Hollywood Loves Sex Worker Culture — But Not Sex Workers

From“Hustlers”to “Pretty Woman,” films centering sex workers continue to drive blockbusters for Hollywood — and last year was no different. “Anora” was one of Hollywood’s most lauded films of 2024, despite getting snubbed at Sunday’s SAG Awards. The film, which tells the story of Russian American sex worker Anora “Ani” Mikheeva (played by Mikey Madison), was not only beloved by critics and audiences but also represented a reckoning with the historic lack of authenticity in these movies.

By casting real-life sex workers in the club scenes of “Anora,” the film made strides that are rare for Hollywood. Multiple sex workers were reportedly hired as consultants to ensure the accuracy and fair portrayal of these characters, and there was even a private screening of the film hosted for strippers and sex workers.

Still, despite these few steps in the direction of giving credit where it’s due, the reality is the film industry continues to discriminate against many actors with a history of sex work — ironically, even when they’re auditioning to play sex workers.

Luna Sofía Miranda is an actor and sex worker who plays Anora’s best friend and colleague, Lulu, at the fictitious HQ strip club in Manhattan. She tells me she began her career as a sex worker to help fund herself through college.

The daughter of two film professors, Miranda possesses a wide range of knowledge around the film world. With this background and her own professional expertise, she refers to herself as “the sex work in cinema girl,” able to critique the movie industry from an informed place.

“I feel like I’ve done a lot of interviews, and everyone just wants to talk about the night that I met Sean Baker at the strip club, which was actually really mundane,” she says, referring to meeting the director and writer of “Anora.” “No one wants to talk about this dichotomy and, almost like, colonizing of sex worker stories, without actually helping or uplifting sex workers at all.”

Miranda views “whorephobia” — the hostility and stigmatization of sex workers — in Hollywood as demonstrated in two ways. The first is sex workers not even being considered for the role because of their job.

“I’ve been asked to audition for sex worker roles, and then they pass to a celebrity,” she says. “I’ve met a lot of people who have said, ‘If you’re a stripper, it’s OK, but if you take your business on the internet, you’re going to be blacklisted from 50% of all castings.’”

The second is the typecasting and exploitation of sex workers who do happen to be cast. In roles with nudity or sex, Miranda shares that directors and agents often reach out to her to recommend friends for film roles. For these roles, she explains, there’s an expectation that these performers get paid less than traditional actors — and be fine with it.

“Strippers won’t do shit for free. They’ll charge you more than an actress. [There’s] this kind of idea that, because we’re already naked at our jobs, it’s OK,” Miranda says. “Whether or not we’re comfortable being naked on camera is beside the point. You should pay someone for their work and their experience.”

Whorephobia extends beyond actors and Hollywood, permeating all aspects of our media and ostracizing anyone who chooses to experiment with sex work. In 2011, Angelea Preston won Season 17 of the long-running modeling reality competition series “America’s Next Top Model,” but had her title revoked after it was discovered by producers she had worked as an escort. (She has since left the modeling industry to pursue a career as a journalist.)

Amid a slow but firm pushback against this discrimination, Miranda says that films are increasingly trying to cast actual sex workers to play sex workers to avoid criticism — but with caveats. In her experience, sex workers are often expected to cover their own costs for hair, wardrobe, makeup and transportation without compensation.

“If you want to have us on set, you need to respect us and pay us accordingly,” Miranda says.

While many films are getting the treatment of sex workers and performers wrong, some cinephiles and sex workers alike argue that “Anora” got it right. Miranda shares that the representation in the storytelling was distinct, adding, “Anora is the main character. In a lot of stories, sex workers are completely inconsequential and are in the story for no reason.”

Miranda says that part of her own role was to ensure the film and script felt authentic and accurate to the sex worker community. She mentions how realistic Anora’s strip club scenes were, which she attributes to the work of the consultants. She also praises the film’s ability to humanize Anora and portray her character with nuance, diverting from the common “heart of gold” or “cold and unbothered” tropes used to objectify sex workers in other films.

Both Miranda’s on-screen role and her behind-the-scenes work as a consultant were a result of her grit and proactivity. She shares that she approached directors Sean Baker and Samantha Quan at the club she worked at, which led to her landing the audition. When the time came that they asked her to help educate Madison on the culture and community of sex workers, she advocated that she be employed as a consultant instead of solely an actor.

Although “Anora” has been a recent, more progressive frontier in stories about sex workers, the film hasn’t been free from criticism either.

Sex worker, content creator and host of the podcast “The Wh*re’s Bedroom,” Lucy Huxley stands firmly at the intersection of pop culture and sex worker advocacy. While initially enjoying “Anora,” Huxley shared on TikTok that she hated the ending scene, feeling that it left viewers with the conclusion that “[Anora is] only a sex worker and that she simply doesn’t know how to have emotional relationships outside of work — a tired, boring and inaccurate stereotype that is placed on sex workers all the time.”

Huxley felt the ending should have departed from a tired norm and instead presented “that breakdown at the end with a friend or someone else in her life to show more of her emotional life, who she is as a person outside of her job, and dispel the stereotype that she is an emotionally broken sex worker.”

Miranda agrees — to a certain extent.

“I’ve been reluctant to comment [on Lucy’s video] because I played Anora’s best friend in the film. People will just be like, ‘Oh, she just wanted more screen time,’ which, hey, I’ll always take more,” she jokes. “But that’s a valid point. I hope in the future to see sex worker movies where strippers and sex workers [are] comforting each other. When I get sexually assaulted at the club, it’s my coworkers that are there for me.”

The bottom line, Miranda asserts, is that sex workers will not be destigmatized until they’re the ones telling their own stories. She’s currently taking matters into her own hands by working on her own project, “Film Girl,” a drug-fueled erotic slasher.

While not about a sex worker, Miranda shares that the film is “sex worker-coded”; she cherry-picked team members and wrote and funded the project herself with the help of her own clients at the club she worked at.

“Seventy percent of the funds came from clients who decided that they wanted to support me because they believe in me,” she says. “That’s something that’s never addressed in movies. I have a lot of financial friendships with clients that I feel respect me and see me more than the average person, and they’re supporting my work.”

Returning to “Anora,” Miranda concludes our conversation with, “I really hope that ‘Anora’s’ success and Mikey Madison’s success mean that sex workers can play leads in their own stories. Because there are so many of us paying our way through drama school or supporting our careers through sex work. We should be first in line.”