I mean, I really resonated with Sarah Jo for several reasons, so that was an easy connection there. So, I just have to take that and try and connect with it. The character description of what she was wearing and the relationship she has with her family, it's all there. Kristine, how did you think about Sarah Jo after reading the script?įroseth: Honestly, everything is on the page. It's interesting because in Mikey and Nicky, the women who get one scene are more fully realized than women who get whole movies now, but there's also all these really complicated sexual politics steeping all of those movies. Goodbar to Barbara Loden's Wanda to movies like Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky, where you get to see these tragic women step in and step out. I just texted her last night, "You are my full-on muse."ĭunham: I was thinking about everything from Looking for Mr. Her ability to both really believe and suspend her disbelief and to make the character really real while also living in the fantasy was such a gift to me as a director. She stepped on set and had this completely new take that brought an entirely other dimension. Meeting Kristine, the clarity with which she spoke about the character was really amazing, and she's so disarmingly intelligent. I had very distinct ideas in my head about who was going to play the other characters, but I knew that Sarah Jo was going to be someone I didn't know yet. This character was almost like a little bit of a cartoon princess turned sideways. Then it really was one of those things where it was like this fully birthed, half-fairy tale came out in my head. I talked to Kristine about this: Despite being around worlds like the art world or Hollywood where people trafficked in certain kinds of extreme knowledgeability, I always had a little bit of a naivete and a gullibility that sometimes served me well and sometimes served me less well. And I started thinking, "What if we were to reverse all of those tropes?" Some of the most interesting things that you get to do in your writing is take aspects of yourself and metastasize them so that they become much larger. They were overly wise-cracking and mature while also not necessarily being able to actually take any ownership of their lives or their bodies. Lena Dunham: I was writing the film while I was watching a lot of films from the '70s with female protagonists, thinking about the way that those characters were both allowed to be sexual but also not really have any agency over their sexual power. Lena, how did you find her in the writing process? And how did that evolve once Kristine came on board? Thrillist: Sarah Jo lives in this space between maturity-she had an emergency hysterectomy as a teen-and extreme innocence. To delve deeper, Thrillist got on a Zoom call with Dunham and Froseth-whose previous credits include Hulu's Looking for Alaska and Showtime's The First Lady-ahead of Sharp Stick's July 29 theatrical release. It's a distinctly idiosyncratic film, one that seems to delight in pushing buttons. Dunham, who was inspired by her own surgery following endometriosis, follows her through her initial infatuation and heartbreak as she starts to take a more clinical approach to sexual know-how, eventually landing somewhere adjacent to enlightenment. Sharp Stick charts Sarah Jo's journey to pleasure in at times discomfiting thoroughness. She's a 26-year-old virgin who had a hysterectomy when she was a teenager and has already gone through menopause, but, spurred by a sudden desire to explore her sexuality, begins an affair with the handsome, goofy, and very married father (Jon Bernthal) of the special-needs boy for whom she cares. She lives with her mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her influencer-wannabe sister (Taylour Paige) in a Los Angeles apartment complex where Sarah Jo is responsible for giving tenants eviction warnings. When she eats yogurt, she gets it all over her mouth. Sarah Jo dresses like a rag doll and speaks like a mouse might. At the center of Lena Dunham's strange, amusing, and occasionally vexing new film Sharp Stick is Sarah Jo, played by Kristine Froseth.