Cecilia Frugiuele interview
Cecilia Frugiuele talks about working with Desiree Akhavan to write The Bisexual.
The Bisexual is your new comedy for Channel 4 - can you explain a little bit about the show?
The show is a sexual coming of age about a woman who has identified as a lesbian for her whole life and only now, in her mid-30s, she comes out as bisexual and starts dating men for the first time.
Desiree wanted to explore, what she thought to be one of the last taboos. She felt that as a bi woman she still ended up defining herself according to whoever she was dating at the time but whenever she was single, she felt like she was in a "no man's land" not knowing how to define herself and shying away from the word bisexual as it still carried a lot of prejudice.
It's genuinely seen as one of the last taboos?
I think so. It might be the odd "joke" here and then about the fact that bisexuals are not trustworthy, the idea that they all would be up for a threesome on a whim and that male bisexuality is just a gateway before admitting to being gay while women are just "experimenting". Desiree is still kind of adverse to the word. The title of the show, The Bisexual, was supposed to be a working title as that word made us uncomfortable. But in the end I think it's the perfect title for the show. If something makes you uncomfortable it's all the more interesting, and that's very much our show.
How did you become involved with the show?
Desiree had just moved back to London in 2015 to promote Appropriate Behaviour, after having been to LA and pitched the show with Rowan Riley (co-creator of the show). Seeing how well Appropriate Behaviour was being received in the UK, she decided to see if the same concept could work for the UK. That's how she met [executive producer] Naomi de Pear.
We had been co-writing our second feature (The Miseducation of Cameron Post) and the transition to us co-writing the show happened somehow organically thanks to Naomi and [producer] Katie Carpenter who were great supporters of our collaboration.
How did you guys meet?
We met at university in 2005. She grew up in New York and did a year abroad in London, and I grew up in Milan but I was studying in the UK. We were both at Queen Mary University and just really clicked - we became each other's family, and would spend all day watching TV and eating noodles. Not a very 20-something lifestyle, we were like a retired couple in their 70's. When she went back to New York we would see each other every few months. By 2012 we were working together on Appropriate Behaviour, and just never really looked back.
Both The Bisexual and Appropriate Behaviour start with the break-up of a long term relationship. Why is that a fertile starting point for a drama?
I guess, depending on how you look at it, it can be a bleak end point but the moment when the world starts crumbling under your feet, when someone pulls a rug under you suddenly everything is a possibility.
Why do you think writing with Desiree works so well?
Desiree's work is always somehow personal and she puts 150 per cent of herself in it. To do that, to write, direct and star in something, you need someone next to you who shares your taste, shares your sense of humour, and has your back. When you lose perspective, you have someone there to help you. I'm that person for her, someone she can really count on. It allows her to give herself completely and to take risks.
Does the fact that you grew up in different cultures from each other influence your respective writing styles, and how you work together?
Probably, I think with The Bisexual we both look at British culture and London as outsiders, with different perspectives but a few similarities since Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures are not a million miles away, especially in the way you behave with your family.
Another thing we both recognised in each other was that we were both late bloomers. We both grew up being the "friend" and not the centre of the attention. I remember thinking when I met Desiree "Oh, you too were standing in a corner looking at people having fun." We were the wing-women. Perhaps that was the catalyst of our friendship more than nationalities - being a bit of an outsider looking in, and being really interested in looking in.
After making two films together, why did you decide to go down the TV route?
Because we had already explored some of the themes from the show in Appropriate Behaviour and that's has far as a 90 minutes narrative could take us.
Working in TV and especially with a partner like Channel 4, you can take many more risks and people are pushing you to take those risks. You're allowed to trust your audience, push the envelope more. And there's the amazing privilege of knowing where your product will end up - you don't have to make it wondering if anyone's going to pick it up, and having to persuade people to go to the cinema to see it, for it to be successful.
Is it significantly different, writing for a TV show?
You have the luxury of being able to build characters fully and in a more nuanced way. You don't have to spell things out quite as much as when you write for a 90-minute narrative. You can have more fun even though that means a lot of re-writes.