The Method Actress

"What the hell?!" Jonathan said as he spat out the slimy, gooey thing he had taken a bite out of. The strange, gray goo fell back into his plate.

Ellie chuckled—her version of laughing out loud. Where Jonathan was full of passion and prone to extreme emotions, Ellie often seemed closer to an android; always relaxed in a state of calm neutrality. Their appearances reflected that too: he had bright blonde hair and blue eyes, while she had dark brown hair and dark brown eyes.

"This is a French restaurant," she said, pointing to their surroundings. "You don't like French food?"

"What is this?!"

"Snail."

"I didn't order snail!"

"I did." He noticed the little smile in the corner of her lips. Most people wouldn't be able to detect it—her mannerisms were too subtle for most people to notice, but Jonathan had directed her in four movies, by this point. He was great actor's director, one who could detect the smallest details in an actor's demeanor. "When I was going to the bathroom after we ordered, I told the waiter to add a little something for you: snail shoved inside your steak."

Jonathan deflated like a ball. She had gotten him, again. "Will you ever stop with your pranks?"

"Never." Asking Ellie Price to stop her pranks was like asking a fish to live out of water. Mischief was her favorite pastime; always fucking with people and delighting in their annoyance. Her secret was her demeanor: no one would ever expect this quiet, calm, hoodie wearing young woman in the corner to cause any trouble.

"How the hell did they agree to shove snail inside a steak anyway? Food is sacred to the French."

"Artsy movies too, and they really liked our last one. I'm pretty sure the waiter recognized me from Annie's Stay. Probably why he agreed."

"There's no way he recognized you. Most actors just play roles, but you disappear into yours. Annie, Mila, Therese, Fran, none of them feel like you."

"You can thank method acting," Ellie said. "It's effective, but it's hard." Saying that brought her flashbacks of Annie's Stay, the last film she had worked on with Jonathan. Boy, what a heavy role that had been. A post WWII setting, a holocaust survivor character, themes of trauma and PTSD...

"You didn't have to go that deep," Jonathan remarked, noticing the lingering heaviness on Ellie's face.

"If I hadn't, your movie wouldn't have been as good."

She didn't regret a single second of that experience, but it had been heavy. Method acting meant becoming the character, feeling that character's emotions, and never breaking character for the entire duration of a shoot. After the first two weeks of shooting Annie's Stay, Ellie had been diagnosed by her psychologist with very real side-effects of trauma, stress, and PTSD. None of these problems, she suffered from, but her deep dive into Annie's broken mind had taken a very real toll on her mind.

Hence her one year long pause from acting. She had needed to recuperate, both in mind and body, and especially get back all the weight she had lost. Her doctors had panicked after Annie's Stay—Ellie's normal physique was already lithe and petite, and her weight loss during the previous film had turned her into an unrecognizable skeleton.

Thankfully, she now was back to the petite, lithe brunette she was, with the physique of one who jogged every day and ate healthy. Ellie jokingly referred to Annie's Stay as "losing what little tits I had to begin with," though no one could ever tell the difference there. Her clothing style was that of a homeless man: baggy cargo pants, hoodies too big for her and running shoes.

That was Ellie's secret for not losing her mind: she could explode into a kaleidoscope of emotions when shooting movies, crying, and screaming and laughing without exhausting her psyche because her usual self was calmer than the Dalai Lama himself. Take Buddha, the Dalai Lama, the Jedis from Star Wars, and the Christian monks in their monasteries, add up all their peacefulness, add to it just a little bit of mischief, and you would get Ellie Price.

"So, any roles you're thinking of taking up?" Jonathan asked, putting aside his disgusting steak, and focusing instead on the vegetables.

Ellie played with her food a bit. The fork pushed aside some puree and legumes. "I don't know..." she mumbled. "Got a few offers for big budget films, the superhero ones, but they're not my type. I like small films with small teams."

"So, no interesting roles lately?"

"There have been. I was offered a few, read the scripts... They weren't bad, they were interesting, but... Not unique, you know? Not challenging."

She wanted roles that completely challenged her own sense of self, characters she could disagree with completely, whose worldviews could be completely contrary to hers. The beauty of acting was empathy—it was about stepping into the shoes of people you had nothing in common with and expressing their plight and sorrow with enough passion to drive audiences to tears.

"What about you?" she asked. "Got another film coming up?"

"I actually do," he said with a smile. "Just finished the script, now I'll start casting." His smile fainted a little. "I'll say it upfront so that you're not disappointed, but... there's really no characters in it that I would see you playing. We'll have to wait for the next film to work together."

"Aw, shucks," she said, all smiles and high spirits. "No hard feelings, don't worry." Ellie did her best to hide her disappointment. Jonathan was her favorite director—he had the juiciest roles and the most challenging scripts. "So, what is it about?"

"It's called Obsession," he whispered, leaning towards her with trepidation. "The film follows two protagonists, Peter and Julie. They both have sex addiction, and the movie explores their addiction and how they live with it. Peter is addicted to dominatrixes, he can't stop spending his money on them, he falls in love with them, obsesses over them. He can't form relationships with women unless they dominate and humiliate him."

He took a sip of water, recuperating some of his breath before resuming: "Then you have Julie, tall, blonde, beautiful, can get any man she wants, but she has an obsessive oral fixation, and just like Peter, she can't form relationships with men unless she's sexually submissive towards them. She could get any man she wants, and yet she spends her time blowing every single man in her life, all of them. Her coworkers, her neighbors, the mailman... She has platonic male friends that she tried having normal friendships with, and over the course of the film, she can't keep it up and she just has to blow them too. So Peter's theme is the whips and the leather, and Julie's is, to put it bluntly, penises in her mouth."

Ellie had to exhale jokingly. "Wow," she said. "That's a lot. Daring movie, huh?" That was pure praise to Jonathan's ears, and it made him smile proudly. "What about the sex scenes? Are they gonna be real?"

"I wish everything on camera could be real, but there's no way I could find high caliber actors who would do it. I could get porn actors, but then you lose the high caliber acting."

Shame, Ellie thought. She was a method actress, after all, she liked her films raw and real. "Well, I know you'll knock it out of the park. Hey, send me the script tonight. I'd like to read it. Won't have a role in it, so at least I can enjoy it as the audience."

"Sure thing."

They spent some more time catching up, and eventually, finished their dinners and said goodbye to one another. Ellie returned to her apartment around 11am. Before she could change into her baggy pajamas and jump into bed, her cellphone vibrated. Jonathan had sent her Obsession's script. She was tired and the bed was more than welcoming, but that story he had described to her... well, it wouldn't leave her mind.

"Just a few pages," she thought to herself.

She sat on her armchair in the living room, not even bothering to turn on the lights. After the first page was read, she knew she'd have to read all of it in one go. Ellie poured herself a glass of wine and hungrily devoured the digital pages on her cellphone. The script was interesting, but it was one half of it that fascinated her: Julie's half. She soon found herself skipping Peter's scenes and jumping with trepidation into Julie's. It was... incredible.

Julie was obsessed with it—sucking cock. The scenes described her heart beating as she couldn't take it anymore, as the madness of arousal took over her and turned her into a crazed animal for whom the absence of cock in her mouth was an unbearable feeling. Ellie imagined putting herself in that situation—heart beating, breathing hard and fast, almost like during a panic attack or an overwhelming feeling of anxiety. What a difficult emotion to convey realistically. What a challenge it would be.

This character... Julie... she was probably the oddest, strangest character Ellie had ever come across. After all, what was the first rule of creative writing? A character with a relatable motivation. No matter who the character was—hero, villain or just a supporting character in the back. If the audience couldn't relate to them, then they couldn't care for them and their plight, and their investment in the movie would fail. Why did audiences love Luke Skywalker and Cinderella? Because their motivations were understandable—to do something more with one's life, to find a better life free of suffering... anyone could understand that.

But... sucking cock? That vulgar, basic sexual act as the entire theme, motivation and driving force of a character? How the hell could someone make this work without turning the movie into an absurd comedy? She remembered some terrible movie from the 90's, a comedy where there was a female character in a wheelchair. Her running gag throughout the film? She wanted to suck the protagonists' penis. A funny joke, everyone laughed at it, and why wouldn't they? A woman wanting to suck cock? Actively desiring it and yearning for it? Well, that was absurd—there could be no reason on earth why a woman would want to suck cock... right?

And now Ellie was reading this complex, riveting character study. And somehow, this absurd desire seemed far less so, all the sudden. Julie made sense as a character. She suffered from anxiety, stress and constant pressure from her job, her taxes she had to pay, her rent... And she found temporary respite from all that stress in a simple thing: hard cocks in her mouth.

Julie was sexually submissive—she wanted to feel dominated, taken control of and owned by someone else. Blowjobs gave her that feeling better than anything else. She could be on her knees, lower, pleasuring and servicing a man that dominated her. The script described how the physical act itself was rewarding to her—the cock was hard and warm, comforting, something strong and solid, like a rock.

In a life full of responsibility, stress and uncertainty where everything could suddenly take a turn for the worst, Julie used blowjobs as a calming mechanism: for a few minutes, sometimes hours, she could be free from responsibility, and these hard, solid cocks were like rocks in the river of her life—stable anchors amid chaos. She could just close her mind to all her troubles, escaping the burden of strength and exchanging it, willingly, for a vulnerable, obedient place, one where she didn't have to lead and take all the decisions, where she could let someone take charge and make her feel guided.

In the script, Julie would drag coworkers from her office into the bathroom in the middle of the day and throw herself to her knees—she would go hang out with platonic male friends she had known for years, men with whom her relationship had not had a shred of sexual tension, and beg to suck their cocks.

She was this strange, conflicted and vulnerable character who willingly turned herself into the filthiest of whores. One who, desperate and begging, stripped herself naked in front of all the men in her life and made herself sexually submissive to them. There were intense emotional scenes, ones where Julie, at the height of stress and anxiety, would find so much relief in sucking cock that she would cry and bawl her eyes out from joy while sucking off dozens of men.

The visual component was amazing: Julie was always naked during the blowjobs and the men weren't. Ellie read, captivated, a scene where Julie dragged her male coworkers into an office, closing the door and tearing her clothes off from desperation. It fascinated her—Julie's clothes felt like a prison to her, a prison that signaled equality with the men whilst she wanted to be their submissive. Jonathan's writing described her thought process, how her clothes suffocated her, how she needed them off, desperately, as if they were insects eating her skin alive.

Ellie imagined herself internalizing these thoughts. Not just playing the exterior emotions as normal actors did, but actually feeling them, feeling them in the deepest part of her soul through method acting. Any actor could convincingly shake their hands and put on a desperate face, but that wasn't Ellie's way. A typical actor would find a way to make their facial expression and body language believable, and through the believability of these things, the audience would understand what was going on inside.

But Ellie didn't focus on the outside—she started from the INSIDE. If she could get herself to think the character's thoughts and feel the character's emotions, then the tears and the facial expressions would come naturally, all by themselves. And that was the highest form of acting one could witness.

Ellie imagined applying this method to Julie. To cry out of joy because of a cock in her mouth... to convincingly portray the relief, the joy, the bliss of sucking cock... what an unheard-of acting exercise... What an unusual challenge... And what a difficult challenge. It was easy to convince an audience that a male character would enjoy getting blown, no one would question that. You wouldn't need to convince an audience that a woman would enjoy getting eaten out. People would readily accept these ideas in a movie, even if the acting were to be terrible.

But to convince an audience that a female character enjoys sucking cock to the point of tears? That she can't stop while the men beg her to, exhausted? That it is her favorite pastime in the world, that she enjoys it more than being penetrated? That would be an incredible challenge for the film. The script and filmmaking would have to sell the idea perfectly, but without a pitch-perfect performance from Julie... no one would believe it.

By midnight, Ellie had put down her cellphone after finishing the script. Her glass of wine was empty. Her apartment's living room was engulfed in darkness. Outside, behind the transparent glass curtain wall, she could see the city's skyscrapers shining brightly. Well... she had finished reading the script. From there, she could do nothing but wait for Jonathan to cast the actors, shoot the movie and release it.

And then, she would go to the premiere and watch Julie's story on screen. Julie... The most fascinating character she had come across since Annie. And even then, Annie was more than typical—a gentle, sweet survivor of trauma. Julie was a lively, sexy, seductive nymphomaniac addicted to BDSM, submission and giving blowjobs. How many times had Julie seen such a character—one who tore her clothes off out of desperation to suck off platonic male friends?

In that moment, Ellie felt some jealousy. She knew that whenever the actress would be cast, her jealousy would worsen. Such a strange and...risky character to play. Ellie loved characters that one had to struggle to relate to—characters it wasn't easy to agree with on every single point... Ellie could not ignore the obvious. As an actress, she was part of an industry with a dark, dark past. Thankfully, she had never endured the horrors so many of her female peers had lived through, but still... To have a female protagonist who loved sexual submission towards men, whose favorite hobby was worshipping cock... There was a tension there, given the film industry's recently uncovered crimes. Tension and controversy... These things attracted Ellie like light attracted moths.

Suddenly, she felt her hands grab her cellphone, and a second later, she was calling Lara. Her profile picture appeared on Ellie's screen as her phone rang, along with her name, Lara Huang, showing the beautiful woman with her enormous black ponytail. "Please answer, please..." Ellie thought. Lara always went to sleep around midnight. There was a chance she could be awake, and Ellie hoped it would be the case, because she didn't want to wait until morning to talk with Lara. Thankfully, her friend answered.

"Ellie?" the tired voice said. "It's midnight..."

"I know, I'm sorry. I just really, REALLY need to talk."

"Is everything OK?"

"Yeah, yeah, don't worry. I just... I was thinking about something. How can you... how can you justify being sexually submissive to men in 2021?"

She heard an exasperated groan. "Oh God, no... You're gonna start criticizing me too? I already have to deal with asshole men calling me a slut and radical feminists patronizing me, Ellie, I'm tired of debating whether I have internalized misogyny or not, and I'm certainly not in the mood to do it at midnight!"

"Nononono, Lara, listen to me, it's not that at all! I'm not here to criticize you, promise. I never had anything against BDSM, you know that. You're a porn actress, Lara, how the hell could I have been your friend all these years if I was all sex-negative?"

She heard Lara take a deep breath and exhale. "Phew... But then, why are you asking me this?"

Ellie rose a little as she sat on the armchair—her fatigue from the day had disappeared and her mind was now as fresh as if it was morning. "I've just been thinking about BDSM a little. Now you know me, I'm not kinky, you could barely even call me sexual."

Lara chuckled. "Yeah, how many times per year did you say you have sex? Five or ten?"

"Five or ten, yeah. Listen, I never wore anything sexy in my life, all my sexual experiences were basic as fuck... I'm not a sex-negative or a sex-positive feminist, I literally don't have an opinion on these things. I'm just a live and let live feminist. But... I've started thinking about BDSM, ok? And I just... I'm not sure I get it, dude. Like... You're for equality, right?"

"Of course I am."

"I know you are, you're one of the biggest feminists I know. But you've got to understand—from the point of view of someone who never did BDSM; it doesn't make sense. It looks hypocritical. Like, how can you denounce sexism during the day and then get spanked by a man at night?"

She heard Lara sigh, then take a deep breath. Ellie knew that as a submissive, BDSM porn actress, Lara had faced opposition from all sides: men objectifying her, calling her a slut and insulting her; and at the other end of the spectrum, sex-negative feminists calling her at best a victim of a patriarchy she didn't understand, and at worse, a traitor who was complicit in the preservation of sexism. Being Asian just added another layer to that burden of guilt heaped upon her—many in her community accused her of continuing the stereotype of Asian women being submissive. That sigh Ellie had just heard was the sigh of someone who had had to defend and justify herself a thousand times over, and was tired of it.

"God, where to start?" she said with that thick British accent of hers. "What's that video game you're into? The one you forced me to play the other day, the one with the guns?"

"Call of Duty."

"Right, that one. You play that game. I guess you're pro-war, then."

"What? No, I've always believed in pacifism, you know that."