Minx cast and creator on Shelly's surprising sexual liberation
Warning: This story contains spoilers from Friday's episode of Minx, "It's Okay to Like It."
Shelly (Lennon Parham) and Lenny (Rich Sommer) are having a swinging good time trying to work out their marriage.
On Minx, Shelly, sister to Joyce (Ophelia Lovibond), has been searching for her identity, including her sexual needs and desires, since her sister's magazine and her work there opened her eyes to the possibility of a life beyond her world as a housewife. But in the third episode of season 2, we learned that Shelly and her husband Lenny have expanded their horizons further than we might have thought possible — they're now swingers who host monthly dinner parties for their couple friends to swap partners.
Parham says that creator Ellen Rapoport warned her that Shelly was in for a rollercoaster of a season this year. "Ellen took me through Shelly's storyline specifically because it is quite a journey," the actress says in an interview conducted prior to the start of the SAG-AFTRA strike. "It's a wild ride and I'm having a lot of sex. I think as a courtesy call, [Ellen] was just like, 'Hey, you're gonna have a lot of sex this season.'"
Though Shelly and Lenny's new lifestyle might feel initially shocking, both Parham and Rapoport see it as a natural extension of the era and the couple's marital issues. "The swinger thing, it makes sense. We've all seen The Ice Storm, right?" quips Parham, referencing the 1997 Ang Lee drama about swinging couples in 1973. "It was a thing that happened a lot in the '70s. It makes total sense that this would happen in this community."
Adds Rapoport: "I wouldn't say it's like the natural response necessarily, but it felt period appropriate. Lenny knows something's wrong, he wants to work things out with her, they've had sexual problems in the past and that's where he thinks to look."
Parham notes that the entire endeavor is very straight, given Shelly's previous moments of sexual exploration. "Even though we're switching partners, it's still so heteronormative," she reflects. "It's not at all touching that part of Shelly that she feels afraid of. For her husband, it's keeping him happy as a clam. So, she didn't have to even talk about the emptiness that she feels inside."
John Johnson/Starz Shelly (Lennon Parham) and Len (Rich Sommer) on 'Minx'
For Rapoport, the choice was about showing how desperately Shelly is searching for answers within her marriage. "I wanted to make clear that she's not sure what she is or where she's going or where her sexuality lies," she notes. "It's a positive thing for her to experience something new sexually. Lenny is probably if not the first, then one of the first people she ever had sex with, given how early she got married."
Rapoport also posits that this probably isn't the first thing Lenny and Shelly have experimented with, just the first effort audiences have seen. "It's going to be good ultimately for the both of them," she reflects. "It's such a restrained decade, the '60s where they came of age, that I think it is good for them to be exploring things sexually in a different way. They're in their forties, but they never really had twenties. They didn't have time to sew their wild oats."
As a dentist and a father, Lenny has always seemed a very straitlaced, vanilla guy — and to some degree, that has been part of Shelly's frustration with her marriage. So, is he really that into swinging? Or is he just humoring her in an effort to save their relationship?
"He's genuinely enthusiastic about wanting to make Shelly happy," says Rapoport. "We've seen in episode 2 that he does have some fascination with light deviance, seeing Deep Throat. He's really representative of men of that era where even the straightest people started to look around and say, 'Maybe the life that my father had isn't necessarily the life that I'm going to have. And there's nothing wrong with that.' It's both. They're all tied together for him. He genuinely loves Shelly and wants her to be happy. And at the same time, it is exciting. He is in this whole new world, and it's nothing like he knows."
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