Shannon Murphy wants to change the conversation around death. “I’ve been obsessed with death from such a young age and in many ways it’s this great adventure that we will all go on,” says the Australian director. “If we start changing the way we talk about it and look at how we can guide people through death and mourn them without hiding it from society, it could be beautiful.”
It’s this attitude and her curiosity with the unknown that drew the acclaimed theatre, TV and film director to her latest project Dying for Sex, FX’s new limited series starring Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate.
The eight-episode series, which launches on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally on April 4, is based on the heartbreaking true story of Molly Kochan (Williams), a woman who gets a Stage IV cancer diagnosis and decides to leave her husband of 15 years to explore the full breadth and complexity of her sexual desires for the first time in her life. Kochan originally created a podcast with her best friend Nikki Boyer (Slate), where she chronicled the highs and lows of her sexual odyssey as she bravely stared death in the face. It was eventually released on Wondery in 2020, a year after Kochan died at the age of 45 with Boyer by her side.
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The series, which also stars Jay Duplass, Rob Delaney and Sissy Spacek, is written and co-created by Kim Rosenstock (Only Murders in the Building) and Elizabeth Meriwether (New Girl), who also serve as exec producers with Murphy.
“I’m always inspired by writing that feels tonally unusual and incredibly hard to execute,” Murphy tells Deadline. “When I read the script for Dying for Sex what drew me to it was the exquisite tension between raw emotion and brutal comedy. This nuance is very complicated from a craft perspective and that’s what excites me.”
Interestingly, it’s not Murphy’s first foray into exploring death: Her debut feature Babyteeth, which earned her a BAFTA Best Director nomination in 2021, followed a teenage girl with terminal cancer who falls in love with a drug addict, something her parents struggle to navigate.
“There are definitely similar themes between the two,” says Murphy, who has also directed episodes of Killing Eve and half of Bad Wolf’s historical drama series Dope Girls. “But what I loved about Liz and Kim’s spectacular scripts was the operatic nature to some of the scenes, which always comes from theatre writers. They’re quite bold in how they write scene work and the way they do that – they often just drop you immediately into the moment.”
Murphy directs six of the eight episodes (Chris Teague directs episodes two and three) and while she admits she hadn’t initially listened to Kochan’s podcast upon first read of the script, it was, remarkably, a story that wasn’t entirely alien to Murphy. Before she was born, her own mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at a young age and embarked on her own journey of healing and personal discovery.
“My mother was married at the time, and she left her husband and, in a similar way to Molly, said to him that she didn’t want to die with him,” says Murphy. “She then went to Africa and had this exploration of herself that I really understood when I read this script because she talked to me a lot about it. I thought this project is really about who you really love and how you want to be loved when you’re allowed to stop lying to everyone.
“So, in many ways, Dying for Sex is a love letter to my mother’s experience of becoming more herself and alive than she ever was before that diagnosis. She has always lived life as though it’s her last day – it’s quite extraordinary.”
From theatre to film & TV
Murphy, who is half Australian and half American and grew up in Hong Kong, describes herself as a “complete theatre nerd” who knew from the age of 17 that she wanted to be a director. The beginnings of her career saw her direct in the theatre space for almost a decade. She was mentored by Thomas Ostermeier in Berlin with his company Schaubühne and Cate Blanchett and her husband Andrew Upton gave Murphy her first main stage gig in 2010 – Polly Stenham’s Tusk Tusk – when they were the artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company.
After attending the Berlin Film Festival and being “inspired” by the Berlinale’s short film offerings, Murphy was keen to extend her work beyond stage and went to film school in Australia. “I realized cinema can be as playful as theatre felt to me,” she says.
She worked with producer Imogen Banks in Australia who gave her her first TV gig directing Aussie comedy-drama Offspring. That show, which was already a hit down under and had a swathe of female directors and writers working across it, would give Murphy a strong foundation. She went on to direct several TV series including Australian drama On the Ropes, before entering the film fray with Babyteeth, starring Ben Mendelsohn, Essie Davis and Eliza Scanlan. That film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019 and earned an eight-minute standing ovation at the festival.
Straddling comedy & tragedy
It’s a delicate balance to successfully tread the comedic and tragic line, and Murphy admits she is more “innately drawn to darkness and pain” while creators Meriwether and Rosenstock were more drawn to the comedy. “I could see that sometimes they wanted to stay in the territory of keeping moments lighter but even though I love having people laugh in the most painful of situations, my goal was to make sure there was no cliché and no manipulative sentimentality – it’s got to feel raw and real to me.”
Williams is famed for her dramatic performances, while Slate is perhaps more known for her comedic performances. With Dying for Sex, both actors had to have equal weight in both areas.
“There’s such an incredibly forensic precision and emotional clarity that comes with Michelle but she’s extraordinarily playful at the same time,” says Murphy. “With Jenny, there’s a whirlpool of emotion just ready to surface at any moment and I really enjoyed pulling that out of her and crafting it and giving her the confidence that she is as sublime a dramatic actress as a comedic actress. I think she really proved that in this work. Riding the roller coaster of coming in and out of the tragedy as well was something that we really enjoyed conducting together.”
Molly’s real-life best friend Nikki, who is an actress herself, was present on set throughout the shoot but Murphy says she never interfered. “She was perfect because I would go and talk to her and I’d ask if a moment was a little far-fetched in terms of the realms of reality,” Murphy says. “I know I’m creating a fictional version, but I did want to find out sometimes. She’s rewatching versions of her own life playing out and missing Molly and we’re all channeling Molly and Nikki’s spirit on set but I found it so comforting to have her there.”
During the last few weeks of Molly’s life, Boyer described her as “unlinking from the world” and during that process Molly began hallucinating and seeing clocks flying off the walls. For the final episode, Murphy wanted to do a continuous shot that would visually express Molly’s experience as she edged closer to death in hospice.
“I remember I walked onto the set for that episode and said to our production designer Michael Bricker, ‘I’m so sorry but we’re going to have to push the walls out a meter on each side,’ and he was like, ‘It’s already built.’ But I knew we would have to extend to get the right shot.
“We had all of these puppeteers on butt dollies – it was hilarious – and flying penises and all the actors jumping in and out of shot, hiding behind curtains. It was a real theatre show.”
For Murphy, the experience of working on Dying for Sex is the closest “auteur” experience in she has had in television. “It’s quite hard to speak like an auteur in television. But it did feel like so much of my passion was infused into it,” she says.
For now, the director says it’s a good time for her to pause and head back into the film space. She’s currently in the early stages of her next feature, which is presently under wraps.
“I do hope people watch this series and come away feeling like they can continue to be fearless with the people they love and stop lying to themselves, which is hard to do,” she says. “I think so many of us hate talking in these terms, but radical honesty is really scary, and I think the more we tap into that, the more satisfied we will be in living our lives.
“I just love that about Molly. She got to a place where she could finally ask for the things she wanted, and I would love for people to not get to the point where they’re dying to have to do that.”