When Desiree Akhavan’s debut film Appropriate Behaviour was released in 2014, she found herself having to do interviews for the first time. As an actor, writer and director, there were plenty of prefixes available, but she started to notice that when she was introduced, it was as something else. “Always as ‘the bisexual film-maker’, ‘the bisexual writer’,” she recalls. It wasn’t that it was untrue; the film was about a bisexual character and Akhavan wasn’t hiding her own bisexuality. “But for some reason, when I heard it, it just felt deeply humiliating and personal, like, ‘the bedwetter Desiree Akhavan’. I guess I wanted to make something that chased why.”
To examine those feelings, Akhavan came up with The Bisexual, an excruciatingly funny and frank new six-part Channel 4 comedy drama, through which discomfort runs like a river. It follows a woman in her early 30s, Leila (played by Akhavan), as she leaves her girlfriend (Maxine Peake) and begins to date men. Akhavan says that, towards the end of her own long-term relationship with a woman, she realised she had the makings of “a really great reverse coming-out story ... And my dad, who was so hard to come out to, was suddenly like, what about your audience?” She laughs. “You built a niche for yourself as a lesbian, what a betrayal. And that came into it a lot. It’s funny, because afterwards I fell in love with a woman immediately, but at the time it was like, oh, you’re definitely going to betray her for men. That was the understanding that everyone had.”
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