Actor and writer Rupert Everett is to present a new programme which investigates the sex industry.
Prostitutes are often seen as either immoral individuals or exploited victims, but in this authored two-parter, Rupert gets behind the stereotypes and hears the unvarnished truth from both sex workers and their clients. “Prostitutes,” he says, “are the world’s unacknowledged experts on our most intimate desires.”
Rupert is a passionate defender of the dignity and rights of a group of people who he feels have been unjustly stigmatised for thousands of years. In Love for Sale, Rupert offers an unusually truthful and honest insight into the business, and a funny and sometimes angry attack on the hypocrisy that surrounds the subject. Rupert has a natural connection to the men and women who trade their bodies for a living and gets to the core of what trading means, or does not mean to them.
In the first programme, Why People Sell Sex, filmed across the UK, France, the Netherlands and Israel, Rupert meets a range of sex workers, from the young rent boy working the backstreets of Tel Aviv, to the single mother in Exeter who loves her work and high class Brazilian escort who charges her clients £700 per hour. Rupert also visits his former home of Paris to meet some of the women who work the Bois de Boulogne, a notorious rendezvous for prostitutes. He tells the moving story of his old friend, whose brutal murder brought home to him the dangers sex workers face.
Rupert has an insightful perspective on the subject, which has allowed him, with producers Swan Films, to create two very unique films illuminating the honest truth of sex work.
In the second programme, Why People Buy Sex, Rupert explores the motivations of the men who use prostitutes, talking to self-confessed sex addicts, a married man who enjoys sexual role play with a dominatrix. He also meets a divorced transgender father whose experiences with his ‘straight’ male clients casts a fascinating light on the sexuality of British men and a successful businessman who claims to have spent £150,000 on massage parlour prostitutes in two years. He also meets comedian/actor Russell Brand who talks about his own experiences.
Commissioned by Sara Ramsden, Commissioning Editor for Specialist Factual for Channel 4, Love for Sale will be produced by Swan Films, executive produced by Neil Crombie and Joe Evans and directed by Michael Waldman.
Sara Ramsden says: “Rupert has a unique authorial voice and his opinions range from the theological to the ideological. It’s great to see someone stand up so strongly for the dignity of women living with very difficult choices.
