Fucktoys’ Annapurna Sriram on the female gaze, sex positivity, and François Arnaud

It’s no secret that modern culture is increasingly sexless, at times even puritanical. Mass media, driven by a deep aversion to risk, tends toward beauty sans horniness, shoving aesthetic iPhone faces down our throats without letting those faces do much of anything. When we do get art that centers sex and sex workers, as in 2025’s Best Picture winner Anora, its pleasures are more cerebral than carnal, followed up with a press tour insistent on smoothing its edges for mainstream and Academy Awards appeal (it worked). Worst of all, the kids aren’t fucking.

Enter Fucktoys, the loud, audacious, raunchy debut from writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram. The film, which took the festival circuit by storm following its award-winning premiere at last year’s SXSW, centers on sex worker AP (Sriram) as she embarks on a quest to obtain $1,000 and a sacrificial lamb to lift a curse. Alongside her long-lost kindred spirit Danni, she mopeds through the John Waters-esque Trashtown USA on a gonzo adventure full of oddball characters and all-too-familiar types of clients.

Sriram sat down with Feeld to talk through her journey with the film, sex work, and co-star François Arnaud.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

TL: I wanted to start with the film's title. Obviously it's provocative and it situates the audience immediately. How did you settle on Fucktoys?  

AS: Fucktoys was a funny thing that popped into my head and didn't seem that risqué or crazy. I've worked on this film for over eight years at this point. So pitching it, making it, doing the festival circuit, marketing it, I've come across a lot of people who I feel are very vanilla and told me I should change the title. One of the reasons we refuse to change the title has to do with the history of queer culture reclaiming terminology that is purposely dehumanizing, stripping people of their humanity and their autonomy. Queer culture has this incredible power to reclaim that language and make it our own, something that is playful, that is positive, that becomes a way of dismantling this patriarchal or oppressive culture. In the spirit of that tradition, we felt that it was important, especially in the fascist era that we're in right now, to not censor ourselves, to actually take a stand and fight back against slut-shaming, whorephobia, and misogyny generally. Fucktoys is a positive [term] in the same way that we “serve cunt” or we're like, “yes bitch,” all of these terms that were supposed to tear us down and are now forms of building community. 

Courtesy of Trashtown Pictures

TL: Is it a play on “fuckboys” as well? 

AS: That's definitely a [part] of it. When you think of a fucktoy as this person that you can do whatever you want to, like a sex doll, that’s what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a fuckboy. I think in the grand scheme [of things], it's better to be a fucktoy than a fuckboy, because I'd rather be the living, breathing soul searching for connection than the player running through a bunch of random people without seeing them as people. I know fucktoy is a very common porn search. And then especially with the red pill manosphere, I've seen that term used a lot, casually, with regard to women or groups of people. I search my movie title on Twitter [now X] to see if people happen to be talking about my film and I come across all this really horrific usage of the word, using it in this derogatory dehumanizing way. My hope is that we can counterbalance that with the positives.  

TL: Speaking of the manosphere thing, because that's something that's exploded recently—I mean, you've been with the film eight years now—how has the rise of that culture impacted your journey with the film?

AS: I started writing this movie in 2017, right after peak Bernie-bro culture, #MeToo, Trump was just getting into office. And I didn't really feel like we were pushing a lot of boundaries with the actual content of the film. For my co-lead, I opened up my casting to non-binary, transfemme, femme, transmasc [people]: anyone who's not a cis man. I cast a trans non-binary actor and didn't think anything of it. I was like, “cool, representation, this is awesome.” I'm still living in the era of DEI. And we filmed in 2022.

By the time the film started screening, we [were] witnessing so much more anti-trans legislation in the culture, in politics. The way that culture has just shifted so... decidedly in a different direction, I was not prepared for. Where my head was at when I wrote it and was casting it in 2020-2021 to now, in 2026, I could not have foreseen that those decisions could become so political. Witnessing this decline in culture from acceptance and progress to a scary level of polarization… it's a very different time.

Courtesy of Trashtown Pictures

TL: You’re showing a lot of taboos in the film—you have a piss scene, you have a ball gag bit—but they're not very pulpy or exploitative. It’s kind of deadpan. What inspired that approach?

AP: I'm a very sex-positive person. One of the greatest problems with our society is shame and the wielding of shame as a means of controlling and oppressing people. I work with BDSM a lot. I deal with a lot of fetishes and kinks. If we were able to demystify and almost neutralize kink [and fetish] culture, and sex culture in general, we would eliminate so much oppression from society. People would be able to live more freely and feel comfortable asking for what they want.

I was really interested, not in the physical act itself, but first, in showing the way these things become normalized and casual for sex-positive people, and second, in highlighting the intimate interaction happening secondary to the physical act. I don't really want to film the physical act. That intimate conversation is more funny, idiosyncratic, nuanced, vulnerable to me than just, like, skin-slapping.

TL: There’s a lot of emphasis on this awkward transaction that will precede the act itself. How true to life is that? Why did you feel it was important to lean into that throughout the film?  

AP: I don't know if I see it as awkward. I think of it as vulnerable. In sex and in intimacy there is this real vulnerability between people, on all sides of an experience, whether it's beforehand: “Do you like me? Am I hot? Do I turn you on?” And during it, “do I taste good? Are you liking this? Do you like me?” Afterwards, “what are we? Am I going to see you again?”

When I think of transactional sex, that is such a present part of it I have never really seen depicted in film—the constant negotiation happening between two people. The most intimate part of intimacy is when you have to reckon with those unknowns and questions. All of those new moments when things are uncertain are very common in dating [too]. 

Courtesy of Trashtown Pictures

TL: Fucktoys is pretty different from a lot of what you see in film, especially the sex worker canon. What did you want to add to the canon and how do you feel that your film is in conversation with other works?

AP: I wanted to add the female gaze and female empowerment, which sounds really corny when I say it out loud. When I look at these films, other than I think Working Girls, maybe I’m missing something, but most are made by men. Ken Russell made a lot of films. Pretty Woman is directed by a man. Sean Baker is a man. Actually, Zola was directed by a woman!

But the thing that I really wanted to bring to the table was a woman engaging in sex work with total agency, like, this is my job, this is what I do, everyone clocks into their job, I clock out, treating it as the job that it is and not making it about victimization. I think all work in capitalism is a form of exploitation. The other piece that I really wanted to add was the humor and the absurdity, because when you're living it and working in it, it's funny, and there's a lot of community, a sense of, “this is crazy.”

TL: How much of the film is based on real-life characters that you or your friends have encountered?  

AP: A lot of it's kind of based on real people. I would write down a funny situation or an insane thing someone would say to me in my phone and then build a scene out of it. I'm always searching for that real thing that people say, that you could never imagine, and bottling it and putting it in something. Even the whole ending with François on the bed, a lot of that was [a] real [story]. You’re just like, this person behaves like an insane person. And I could not believe this was really happening while it was happening, but I was also thinking this would be a great scene in a movie.

Courtesy of Trashtown Pictures

TL: On the note of François, I know that you met on the set of a short film… 

AP: The director of that short told me he was cast and I looked him up and was like, “oh my God, he's so hot.” I knew him, I saw The Borgias. He's the kind of actor that is so in his body and so flirtatious that he could probably have chemistry with a tree. Some people just possess that kind of… I don't know what it is. It's like a sexual presence. It's who they are. You meet François, and you're just immediately like, “yeah, this is a very hot person and I understand why people want to fuck him.” But he's also, underneath that, a very smart, emotionally intelligent person, who cares a lot about art. On the set of that short, I sent him Fucktoys and I was like, “would you read my movie?” He read it within three days (very impressive) and came back to me on set [saying], “I read your script, I loved it.” He is such a champion of arthouse, of indie cinema, of plays. [He] was like, “We should make this film. We should do it.” And I was like, “fuck yeah!”

You need those champions early on. He got my producer onboard, and the three of us met and were like, how are we gonna make this movie and shoot it on film? So he was a ride or die from day zero, basically. And he came out to Louisiana, to Malibu, did all the shoots, dyed his hair blonde, gave himself a spray tan for the part, all on his own. When you do a film like Fucktoys, you really need actors who are game and fearless.  

TL: Was he always going to be The Mechanic? 

AP: Oh yeah. He was like, “I wanna play this part.” I never heard him say the lines; I was like, “yeah, you can do it.” When you're making an indie film, to have an actor with a caliber like François, that's a blessing. And you just say yes and know that he has the discipline and training as an actor to make choices and take it seriously. We did a lot of rehearsals, just him and I, figuring out the scene, the beats. I'm usually like “three takes is kind of it,” but he would be like, “I have another idea.” He was really fighting for it to be good. 

Courtesy of Trashtown Pictures

TL: Last question: this is, of course, your directorial debut. And so it's kind of your announcement of yourself as an artist. What do you hope to showcase through the film?

AP: I made this movie for my younger self. I grew up in Tennessee as a little brown girl. I didn't really know anyone who looked like me. I didn't really get to see anyone who looked like me in TV or film. And so I wanted this movie to exist for younger people, for other girls who are slutty and brown and don't fit a Eurocentric beauty standard. I wanted this movie to exist for them to have a touchstone of being a sex object or desirable. 

I also want to pave a path for other female filmmakers, other queer filmmakers, other South Asian/brown filmmakers. To forge a path outside of the corporate media industry that is not only giving representation to these communities, but is also like, we can do this, too. So other filmmakers can take big swings and make fun, campy, irreverent movies—the kinds of movies that we're missing from cinema, the Gregg Arakis and the John Waters and the Ken Russells and the Jim Jarmusches. Where are those films? Where is the 20-year-old Gregg Araki right now? I want these young kids to feel inspired and to feel empowered and free to make a fun, sexy movie. You know?

For more information about Fucktoys, including upcoming screenings, go to fucktoys.lol.

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