Borrowing from everything from the French New Wave and tarot cards to Federico Fellini and John Waters, Annapurna Sriram’s film Fucktoys throws the audience headfirst into fictional city Trashtown, USA to follow AP (played by Sriram herself) on a journey to lift a curse. For a mere thousand dollars, the tarot reader she’s gone to is willing to sacrifice a baby lamb and help her, but making that money becomes its own journey.

The film becomes an odyssey through a dystopian Southern landscape as she tries to pull together her life, seemingly falling apart like the bloodied teeth that have escaped her mouth under this cursed existence. Sriram’s AP encounters many memorable figures, including the collection of men looking to hire her (Damian Young as Robert, Francois Arnaud as The Mechanic, Brandon Flynn as James Francone, etc), a number of psychics warning her about her fate (the first of which is played by Big Freedia), and Danni, the heartthrob of a former friend who also seems like the perfect man for AP (the marvelous Sadie Scott). With the Sword of Damocles hanging over her head, AP’s story is one of beautiful tragedy and fleeting connections.

Months after catching a screening of Sriram’s debut feature, I have yet to stop thinking about what a colorful and wonderfully queer little motion picture it is: its sumptuous 16mm cinematography, the way the tarot folds into its very structure, the collection of gorgeous and broken people that exist within its weird little world, all of it. After meeting at a Q&A and bonding over our shared Aries traits, our adoration of sincerity, and the film’s offensively good soundtrack, I knew I had to interview Annapurna about Fucktoys.

In light of her recent Film Independent Spirit Awards nomination for the Someone to Watch Award as well as the upcoming 2026 roadshow tour and screenings in Los Angeles and Toronto (in February for Sleaze Factory), we sat down to chat about Fucktoys, sex scenes in film, the weight of capitalism, working as director and performer, and so much more.

I know it’s been a long journey to having Fucktoys actually out in the world, so what has that road been like and how did it begin?

This March is going to be nine years since I wrote the script, so it’s been like having a baby and raising the child until they’re legal. I was a struggling actor in New York, and one of the reasons I started writing was because I wasn’t getting the roles that I wanted to play. I also felt like there was this piece of representation missing from media and cinema, which was a non-white person just getting to be an American.

I’ve always had a mission and intention: I want to write a great story and then cast people who don’t usually get an opportunity to play these characters, in part because I’ve been struggling with the complex that this industry brings on us by not having opportunities due to my race. Even some of the “box checking” in casting nowadays comes with its own set of problems because they’re still often centering stories around white people while giving them a diverse and multicultural group of friends that are just props. We don’t get to be fully formed characters.

So it was this Catch-22: I can’t book a job because I haven’t been in a movie and I can’t be in a movie because I’m not what they want. Fucktoys came out of wanting to write myself a job where a brown girl could be an ingénue, could be an object of desire, could be slutty, could be liberated. Women of color typically get typecast into strict, bossy, sassy, and tough roles while white virginal girls get to be soft femme, so I wanted to lean into and play with that archetype.

And then the other thing that happened was I had this breakup because a psychic told me that my boyfriend was making me sick.

So basically, just like the psychic(s) in Fucktoys telling you you’re cursed?

She told me, “If you don’t break up with him, you’re not going to have the career that you’re supposed to have and you’re going to get more sick.” So I broke up with him. But I was really heartbroken and felt crazy because I took her reading so literally. Like, I’d hung up with her and told him we needed to talk. So I started writing this movie in my heartbreak, and I thought this was all so absurd and funny because I could zoom out and have a sense of humor about myself.

The curse is this theme in the film, and I think of it as…it’s like being a person who doesn’t fit into the norm and feeling like everything is working against you and it’s all deeply personal, but then having a moment of clarity where you realize, no, it’s just sexism and racism. I thought life was so hard, but I was interpreting it as “life’s hard, suck it up”, when really the things I’m battling are the very structures of oppression. But I also like to let everyone have their own interpretation of the curse.

One of my questions was actually going to be about how you interpret the curse and how broad it is. Like you could easily argue the curse is an amalgam of “capitalism” or “white supremacy” or “violence against women, queer folks, people of color”, etc. 

And I think it’s the same curse we’ve been battling forever. It’s all of these things that we talk about and are gaslit into thinking aren’t real or don’t exist anymore, and these structures of oppression also exist to oppress white people; we’re all victims!

Just to jump back to you saying “getting to be an American” and prioritizing people who don’t get to be showcased — was Fucktoys always designed to be this portrait of an alternate Americana that doesn’t feel so white and straight and cis and hegemonic? 

Yeah, I’m from the South, and there’s this American Graffiti assumption about “American film”, like this idea that the 1950s was the be-all end-all, and it’s like… no, other people exist. The media likes to pretend all of these people don’t exist, and that perpetuates the homogeneity and white nationalism of our country. Even the landscapes we shot are parts of America we don’t get to see: blown out oil refineries, abandoned factories, weird swamps, and all these liminal spaces. They’re not typically what a director is thinking about when they want to shoot scenery, but they’re so familiar to what I think America is. It’s in highways and strip malls and all these ugly, undesigned areas too.

It’s all just industrial decay in a way. I know you originally wanted to shoot in Florida, but I almost think Louisiana ended up being a more ideal locale for what the film became. While you were scouting, did the realization dawn on you because of it being something of a liminal space between these dead structures and blooming nature?

Louisiana and I have a contentious relationship. It’s very challenging to film in a place like that, where we’d just arrived after Hurricane Ida, there’s this old boys club that exists there, and it all feels a bit “outside the law.” You’re encountering people who don’t give a fuck about your little movie, but I think that Louisiana had the kind of texture I was looking for, which was this mix of beautiful, humid, alive, green landscapes and also the pastels and weird storms that are similar to Florida. You get those crazy electric skies that feel out of this world, but also these blown out billboards, pollution from oil refineries, and old railroad tracks that give this feeling of neglect.

A lot of these communities are fucked over by their own state legislation because the money goes back to the companies and not the communities. Trashtown is just like that: It’s beautiful and there’s beautiful people, but there’s a lot of corruption.

That’s kind of a perfect reflection of America: gorgeous people struggling under capitalism and dealing with the repercussions of rich people who want to throw bad orgies. 

Exactly. They’ll go to “the shitty part of town” and “slum it” for the night, but then go back to their mansions and gated communities. And I wanted to tell the story of what it’s like living in these margins, where there’s an impressive amount of acceptance and community among different types of people. They survive in a way that I really respect.

One of the most interesting bits about the film is how you draw relationships between all the working class characters too. They’re all drawn to helping each other — solidarity between sex workers, of course, but even the way Robert is willing to help AP even though he’s just a john. Is that closer to your own experiences of people working together?

A lot of that was modeled to me when I was younger by the woman who trained me in BDSM. She’s actually my intimacy coordinator [Olivia Troy] and is the receptionist at the hotel in my film. She’s an old friend and modeled this version of female friendship that came down to: There’s enough dick for everyone, and we don’t need to compete with each other. She always says “dick is an ample commodity.” It’s more important to form these communities and sisterhoods because we have to take care of each other.

One of my favorite movies is Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, which features a really young Diane Lane, and she gives this speech on stage when a set is going bad where she yells at the audience and calls out the women like, “You’re here trying to impress these boys, but guess what? They have a plan and none of us are included in it!” And there’s something very powerful about that sisterhood because the patriarchy wants women to fight and be competitive. Us not doing that is a very easy way to reject that principle and also organize.

A lot of films that tell stories about sex workers are about competition, like Showgirls, and I’m sure that exists, but my experience is the opposite. My hope for this film was that we could see positive female friendships and positive connections. There’s even empathy between my character and the wife of a john, where I’m like “I’m not here to fuck up your life, I just needed a place to stay.”

And it’s a nice contrast to watching a john existing just to get off and then fucking the sex worker over somehow. 

Yeah, I think my approach as a writer and director is about radical empathy for all your characters. I don’t think a story will land if you paint people as morally black-and-white. They’re complex and insecure and fragile in different ways, and they’re triggering or looking for different things in each other. People aren’t always so conscious about why they do things, and I think there’s something about having these larger inner lives that are complex on screen.

That ties into all the sex in the movie to me. Just like there’s good and bad in everyone, there’s also positive sexual experiences and negative ones, sometimes within the very same encounter. The possibility of something good or bad happening is always there. Is that something you wanted to show about sex and sex work? 

I’m really interested in intimacy, in the moments before and after sex. Those real moments of vulnerability where that kind of positive-negative shift can happen. Something can be weird, and it becomes sweet. We’re really peeling back so much as people in those intimate moments.

I want to see more of that nuance in cinema and storytelling too. When you have a sex scene that feels so Hollywood — with slow motion and straight-to-banging — I want to know how the characters feel instead. There’s so many things that go on internally, and we hold so many nuanced feelings about intimacy, but we never see that level of peeling back. A hot sex scene can actually feel more ostracizing and isolating to me as an audience member than one that feels clunky and messy and human.

It often feels like people expect something “campy” to not also be fully “sincere” and you do both so well. I know you and others have talked about John Waters and Gregg Araki, but were there other points of reference for your approach for Fucktoys? 

We get equated to them a lot, but I actually feel like they’re less direct inspiration than other films; they’re just the easiest “lookalikes”, you could say. Cleo from 5 to 7 was one I was thinking of all the time, with her shedding her feminine performance through the whole film being something I was drawing upon for my character. There’s also Nights of Cabiria — which is one of my favorite films and kind of the genesis film for Fucktoys — and Sweet Charity, too. I love Giulietta Masina’s tragic clown and the film is so funny and random while also being completely heartbreaking and tragic at the end. I never want to say this because it sounds so pretentious, but I would love for this film to feel like an American Fellini girl power movie.

Both of them [Giuletta’s Cabiria and Shirley Maclaine’s Charity] are sex workers in this kooky funny way but also very sincere romantics looking for true love. That’s me in real life: I’m a slut, I’m kind of crazy, I’m a freak, but I also want real connection and to be taken care of and be safe. I want all of the beauty and romance that everyone wants and I’m very earnest about it.

When you say that, I think about a lot of women, in art and life, who are labeled as “too much” for expressing their desires in any specific way. Was there ever any issue with people saying that while making this? 

Not really, though when I was first pitching the movie I was told it was “too much” for the intimate scenes that were in the script. But I always had this plan to make things implied because I was never really interested in nudity and didn’t want to just make smut or make my actors feel uncomfortable. I’m interested in these private moments of intimacy, and we can imply a lot off camera.

There was a lot of concern from male industry people about me telling the story. I feel like all these films from the 70s and 80s, from De Palma’s movie to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, could all be so erotic and so unashamedly smutty. There’s even random nudity sometimes, like Jamie Lee Curtis could just be naked all the time in Trading Places all the time because she’s a sex worker. So much of that was happening, and I think we’ve sanitized film so much that even just a little bit of sex feels extreme, but when you look at the history of cinema, it’s actually pretty tame. Also, I think people are just weird about women doing it, which I guess is something to unpack.

What was it like crafting this film and, specifically, shooting on Super 16? That aesthetic choice makes it feel both very classical and contemporary and I’m wondering how you went about shooting on film in an era where everything has the same digital look. 

I didn’t want it to look like a TV movie, especially because I’m inspired by all these films from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and they were all shot on film, so they all have a certain look and feel. Something about digital to me is that it just feels like TV because my brain doesn’t register it as cinema. But I test shot the whole film in 2020. We basically went up to a house in Vermont — it was me, my cinematographer, my producer, one of my other exec producers, and his girlfriend — and would just shot-list a scene, and we’d act it out. I could be behind the iPhone and camcorder and decide how to frame everything, so I knew exactly what shots I would need every single day. I prepped the shit out of it, and I didn’t want to cut a lot, so I planned certain scenes to just be one shot and we don’t go to coverage so I wouldn’t even shoot that. I didn’t want to burn through film, and I had to be decisive.

I also thought a lot about how we were going to get the performances. The overhead shot where Robert and I are laying in bed, that was another instance where I didn’t want to get any other shot and we didn’t have to. You can just watch their chemistry unfold. One of my favorite things in acting is behavior and chemistry and watching two people who just naturally have that, and I think, sometimes, with contemporary shooting and cutting, you lose a lot of that “living in the moment” feeling. Even with Francois at the end of the film, when they’re in bed together, I’m like: “What am I going to cut to?” If I punch in, it’s going to be too sexy and the whole point is that we don’t let it feel that way and you don’t cheapen it.

You don’t want to lose the sensation that the characters are experiencing. 

Yeah, exactly. Even that day, I remember people asking if I was sure I didn’t want a close-up of me getting my tongue sucked. I don’t want to use that, and I trusted that the test shoot would work. So that was the process, and then we’d drive the film every week from New Orleans to Atlanta to the lab, which was a one-day trip and we’d take turns driving because I didn’t trust FedEx. It’s precious cargo! And Kodak was really easy to work with, gave us a discount and some rolls of free film, because they want people to shoot on film, and they want to help female filmmakers. There’s something magical about film in the same way there’s something magical about a painting.

So I’m sure the plotting of shots and test shoot helped, but what was it like balancing being behind and in front of the camera, navigating your performance as a director?

I did a lot of rehearsal with my professor one-on-one and, I think because of how much of it was close to me, I knew exactly how I needed to hit things, and it wasn’t a stretch for me as an actor to get to a lot of those places. I had two producers on set who would watch the monitor and act like my personal coaches where I could ask “did this land” and “how did this feel.” I’ve been auditioning on self-tapes for many years, so I have a lot of experience already in directing myself and have confidence in that regard. My cast was also so strong that I could be in the scene with them and all I had to do was respond truthfully because they’re brilliant and bring so much authenticity.

I always joke the bigger performance for me was being the director on set because being a woman, a first time director, and having a crew who doesn’t really know you, required me to have to be supportive and a leader while also being firm and direct about what I want for my specific vision.

And it’s always a slippery slope for a woman becoming “a bitch” so the performance of keeping my cool, being gracious, being supportive, but being firm, is this challenging mix when you just want to be brusque and direct. You have to balance everyone’s personality and sensitivity, and I think that takes a lot more work as a director. You’re kind of like a camp counselor keeping everyone motivated while also having to make the movie you need to make. Being able to act was a relief for me on set because I didn’t have to worry about the other pieces at that moment.

And I think it says a lot about you both as performer and director that you have a real natural chemistry with everyone, like everything with Sadie and you feels like real love.

It’s such a tricky role too because it’s both “sexy brooding bad boy punk” and “wide eyed hopefully innocent lover” but I think Sadie balanced that so organically. Who they are as a person is so open and generous, we talk a lot about earnestness, and they care deeply. They always asked how I was doing with everything and I felt like they gave me extra love in scenes because they’re perceptive. Our scene in the bar, when they read my palms, is one of my favorites in the movie: It’s pure chemistry but also friendship.

How much was built into the role versus what Sadie brought? It’s so nice to have this trans masc love interest who is very James Dean-coded. 

On the page, the character reflected my Achilles heel of always wanting to date these fucked up punk boys where I see the heart inside them, and I know they’re broken, but I love projects. That was always the kernel of it, but Sadie brought depth to it in a way that wasn’t fully there, giving them more softness and sensitivity. You see the familiar archetype they’re filling in Cry Baby, My Own Private Idaho, Drugstore Cowboy — we’ve seen it a lot — but casting Sadie was intentional. The expectation is always going to be a cis boy, but instead let’s put a hot trans masc person in here to show they can carry the same exact swagger and sex appeal, but also bring the softness it needs.

How has it been touring with the film all of 2025 and receiving all this praise and even the Independent Spirit nomination? 

We’ve been working on this movie for almost a decade and I so strongly identify with these characters and the experience of being on the outside, because we didn’t have agents helping or a production company or distributors or sales or resources. This movie is handmade and a sacrifice of our time and so much suffering; there were years of being like “what are we doing.” But I’ve had some profound experiences showing the film. More than any accolades from the industry, it’s in getting to screen at a sex work fest in San Francisco, a porn festival in Berlin, a queer fest in Little Rock. Being in Arkansas, a red state, and bringing together all these people who are reflected in the movie and feel seen — all the people who are there can look around and be friends with everyone, this can be your community. It made me realize in real time the importance of cinema.

With a Marvel movie, the job there is not to create community or start a dialogue, but to buy popcorn, have fun, take a gummy, whatever. And I used to actually think of Fucktoys like that: Just drop some acid and have fun. But the point of it is really to foster community and make people feel like they’re not alone, which was my experience making the film. So getting this acknowledgement feels like it was all worth it. I’m not just this invisible entity fighting to be seen and recognized, but there are other people here who are like me. I hope that there’s a path we’re burning in this forest so that other people like me who want to make this kind of queer cinema, political cinema, smutty cinema, whatever, have an easier path to creation and don’t have to fight as much to be recognized. Is that just cringe? [laughs]

No, I actually think it’s beautiful and sincere. It also ties back into the film itself: finding beauty in these minute moments within a world that’s crushing us. But I’m also a very corny person.

I’m okay being corny! I’m a millennial, and I’m embracing it. It’s also an important part of the experience to talk about how it’s all not just glamour and ease, y’know. People are struggling to make their work. And a lot of this movie is for my inner teenage AP, who grew up in a very white culture and was ashamed of looking different and wanting other brown girls to have a movie where they can just feel seen. They can see someone and say “we are deserving of love, we are desirable, we are hot, we are icons” and this movie soothes that part of me. I would have loved to have this as a teenager and dressed up like her for Halloween. I also hope the same is true for non-binary kids who see Sadie and think, “Oh yeah, I can pull the hot girl” or “I can be this bad hot they/them out in the world.”

And they can be hot cool people and emotionally open at once. You can cry, party, fight, dance, and do whatever — and at the end of the day, even when the worst has happened, you can still find comfort in human connections. 

There’s always that feeling of “when shit’s bad, I just want my mom to hug me” and sometimes, that lack of judgment and that love is all you need, even though it can be hard for us to get that.

This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed to avoid all the segments where we started turning our chat into a light therapy session. 

The best gas mask for most people

The Verge consulted journalists who covered the Portland protests in 2020, where federal and local forces regularly used tear gas against protesters over the course of four months.

It’s important for a gas mask to slide over your head quickly, even in a chaotic environment.

You may be wearing a gas mask for just a few minutes, or you may find yourself in the mask for several hours at a time. After testing against both federal and local law enforcement, we found that although a half-face respirator and goggles are better than nothing, they are not an adequate substitute for full-face coverage.

A quality gas mask should last through normal wear and tear, like getting beaten or thrown around by the police. The materials of a gas mask are especially important if a federal agent grabs you by your hair.

The best gas masks run close to $400, which is not a price point that everyone can afford. Not everyone can shell out for the gold standard in gas masks, but fortunately there are still decent options for around $120.

The best high-end gas mask

Mira makes the best masks that money can buy. Sergio Olmos, who has reported from both Portland and Ukraine, swears by Mira’s CM-6M specifically. Robert Evans of the Behind the Bastards podcast owns multiple Mira products and recommends all of them. His military-grade mask, he says, allows him to breathe while standing in “clouds of tear gas so thick I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.” He also sometimes uses a Mira respirator. During a street brawl between hundreds of Portland leftists and right-wing agitators, Evans was “soaked to my underpants in mace” used by the right-wingers. “But thanks to the full face respirator I was never blinded nor was my airway constricted.”

Also a great choice

Over the course of 2020, Suzette Smith (currently Portland Mercury) tried swimming goggles, “ski goggles with duct tape over them,” and other options before a reader gifted her a 3M 6800 Full-Face Respirator. “I’ve relied on those ever since,” she tells The Verge. Zane Sparling (The Oregonian) also uses a full-face 3M, which he says was the first option he found when he searched Amazon.

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• Sarah Jeong