Nepo Baby of the Week: Elizabeth Hurley Stars in Son’s Psychosexual Thriller
It takes a lot of work to become a feature film director. Often, you’ll spend years slogging away in film school and on sets, networking, and working your way up the food chain until one day, a studio executive decides to give you a shot. Maybe you make some short films, or, in the 2020s, you build your brand on YouTube.
…Or, if you’re very lucky, you’re Elizabeth Hurley’s son, Damian Hurley, so you spend some time on the Gossip Girl set as an 8-year-old, cameo on The Royals a couple times, make a short film in the Caribbean, and presto! Lionsgate is on your doorstep, ready to make your childhood dreams come true.
Strictly Confidential, Damian’s feature directorial debut, hit theaters with a limited release on April 5 and is also available on VOD platforms including YouTube and Google Play, and there’s been seemingly no limit to the amount of press this 20-year-old has managed to attract. Publications like People and Vogue and Entertainment Weekly have all gotten in on the action, as has TMZ—which naturally zeroed in on the fact that, in this film, Damian directed his mother in a steamy, queer sex scene. For the morbidly curious, the trailer for Strictly Confidential is about three hours long and spells out most of the plot, minus one major twist.
I have watched this entire film for journalistic purposes and can confirm that what you see in the trailer is basically what you get from the whole film. The film centers around a young woman named Mia (Georgia Lock) whose best friend, Rebecca (Lauren McQueen), died by suicide. One year after Rebecca’s death, her friends come together on the Caribbean island where she died to process their grief together. It turns out that all of them have secrets, and most of them are of the extremely horny variety. Although our director appears to have been channeling Big Little Lies, the end result feels more akin to daytime television, or perhaps even a telenovela.
It should come as no surprise that a film with this kind of pedigree and a grief-sex heavy plot would attract an outsized amount of attention. More fascinating, however, is the degree to which this first-time director has happily leaned into the “mummy dearest” angle of it all.
I mean, picture this: You’re a film professional in your mid-forties, and you’re taking orders from a college sophomore-aged boss who can’t stop calling Elizabeth Hurley “mum” on set.
In a recent interview with Detroit-based radio host Jim O’Brien, Damian admitted that he “had to grow up quite a lot, quite fast” during the film’s 18-day (!) shoot. “I was 20 when we shot this,” he said, “so to be the boss on set, in charge of 100-plus cast, crew, all the above, is absurd. I was 10 years younger than every single person on set.” I’m sure they loved that!
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During his first day of work, Damian told People, he’d asked his mother, “Should I be calling you Elizabeth?” Apparently, he made it “an hour” before reverting to “Mum.”
The backstory for Damian’s interest in filmmaking has come up multiple times during the Strictly Confidential press tour. “I gave him his first camcorder when he was around 8,” Elizabeth told People of her son. “And from that moment on, he filmed us nonstop. He wrote scripts. He bullied every friend and family member into making his mini-films.” Back then, she told O’Brien, she’d often repeated the same promise: “Darling… Mommy will be in your first movie.” Cut to a decade later, “and then of course my bluff was called.”
Back when he was a young child, she told the YouTuber, she’d hoped he would become a banker or a lawyer with a regular paycheck. “I don’t know anybody in showbiz who says to their kids, ‘Yeah, it’s a great business, you should come in!’” Evidently, however, Damian’s time on the Gossip Girl set as a small child convinced him that Hollywood was the place to be.
As Damian recalled during an interview with Entertainment Tonight, he had a ball working on the CW show. “I had snuck into the editing suite to watch all the editors assemble things,” he said. “I ran lines with everyone. The directors let me call action and cut."
Among the stars who humored him, apparently, was Blake Lively (aka Serena van der Woodsen), who “always” let Damian run her lines with her. “I knew all her lines perfectly. I'd shout them out whenever anybody got them wrong,” he said, which again, I’m sure annoyed no one. Apparently, we have that experience to thank for Strictly Confidential. As Damian put it during that ET interview, “It sparked my creativity.”
Between acting, writing, and directing, Hurley now has a whopping three credits to his name: He appeared in three episodes of the E! drama The Royals (in which his mummy starred as Queen Helena) before writing, directing, and starring in his short film The Boy on the Beach—in which Elizabeth also starred.
The fact that The Boy on the Beach appears to be available nowhere to stream is one of the great tragedies of my life. Still, the short’s IMDb description paints a fascinating picture: “Abandoning her life, grieving Katherine”—that would be Elizabeth—“flees to the tranquil island of Nevis, where she encounters a captivating and enigmatic young man.” (Presumably, this would be Damian’s character, since his face appears right behind her in the poster, blown up huge and staring off into the distance.) “As the two grow closer, Katherine's perception of fantasy and reality begin to blur, throwing her life drastically off course.” Saucy!
Now, we have Strictly Confidential—a TV soap opera-coded psychosexual drama about a friend group recovering from a loved one’s suicide. (If you don’t believe me about the daytime TV angle, check out the clip below from the movie, which features one of the most fascinating music choices I’ve seen in years.)
In all seriousness, the origin story for this film is genuinely tragic. Damian told Vogue that first got the idea for Strictly Confidential as he processed his friend’s death from suicide and describe the process of making it as “quite healing.”
As the director told Vogue, “I think it will resonate with a lot of people who’ve been touched [by suicide], but I also hope, mixed in with that, people can also enjoy [a] sexy, glorious, gorgeous film.” His mother plays a supporting role as Lily, and while her part was initially smaller, her son told Vogue that after Lionsgate approached him, he decided to switch things up and make the film “sexier.”
While Hurley was going to play a maternal figure who’d died, Damian decided her character should be alive, and the father—who’d initially had the illicit affair that became her role—would be dead. “He had this genius idea to switch sexes so that mummy is alive and daddy’s dead,” Elizabeth told Vogue. “It ended up, in fact, being a very challenging part for me. I would’ve been upset if I’d ended up with one line.”
Strictly Confidential did not have the budget for an intimacy coordinator, according to Vogue, but Elizabeth told the magazine that being directed by her son during these steamy scenes was actually “liberating.”
“I found it was the most comfortable I’ve ever been in an intimate scene,” she said. “…He had my back. There was nothing gratuitous that we shot, in my opinion. I felt very comfortable.”
While speaking with ET, Hurley reiterated that she felt “very safe” in her son’s hands because she knew she could trust him. Meanwhile, she said that her least favorite part of working with Damian “was probably not being able to tell you off as I normally would as a mom, like, ‘Elbows off the table, drink more water, eat slowly.’ Those sort of things. I had to control myself.”
Mummy might know best, when her son’s in charge of the set, it’s the nepo babies who rule the roost.
Check out our past Nepo Babies of the Week.
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