‘Each time we could go a little bit more with the danger’: Obsession star Charlie Murphy on Netflix BDSM thriller’s steamy sex scenes

Charlie Murphy doesn’t usually watch herself on screen. She didn’t watch Happy Valley, in which she played victim-turned-copper Ann Gallagher. Nor did she see Peaky Blinders, in which she played real-life trade union activist Jessie Eden for two seasons. But Netflix’s new erotic thriller Obsession was different: “I’m really happy I watched it,” the Irish actor tells me over Zoom. “The main reason was to see...” She pauses for a split second to think of the word she means, before concluding: “To see the process play out.” I’m sorry, I tell her, I really thought you were going to say “the sex scenes” then. She throws her head back and howls. “I watched it to see... the tits. Were they OK? Yes, OK, they’re fine.”  

It’s true: breasts are on show in Obsession, the new Netflix four-parter that’s being touted as the horniest series on the platform. It is part psychological frog boiling, part BDSM thriller. Based on Josephine Hart’s 1991 novel Damage, it tells the story of a well-to-do doctor turned politician, William, who allows himself to become embroiled in a steamy affair with his son’s fiancee, the mysterious and alluring Anna. Quickly, he becomes completely obsessed with her. The sex scenes have been heavily trailed on social media and in the official trailer, all sultry lighting and shots ranging from the suggestive (a thumb being run up a neck, wrists being bound in ribbon) to the downright demonstrative (knickers landing over a pair of heels and Murphy being slammed against a wall by co-star Richard Armitage). It’s “the return of the erotic thriller”, claims one headline.

Reviews have been decidedly mixed; despite the best efforts of its stars, the show doesn’t always maintain its serious steaminess. (“Unintentionally funny”, is how the Indy’s one-star review described it.) But not since Fifty Shades of Grey have we been teased like the slathering horndogs that we are with the promise of flesh on flesh, of kinks played out on screen. “I mean, I’ve been nude a lot before,” Murphy laughs: in Obsession she is mounted and bound, held and controlled by a lover who can demand anything of her. Writing in The Telegraph, Armitage said the project was pitched to him with “a sense of trepidation”, with the actor told: “It’s going to be a challenge, physically. It’s nudity parity (that’s industry speak for full kit off for male and female actors).” 

In Happy Valley, Murphy’s best-known performance to date, we watched Ann Gallagher’s journey from petulant teenage rich kid to troubled, astute police officer after she was kidnapped and assaulted by the evil-to-the-core-or-is-he Tommy Lee Royce. Ann was a role that combined worldliness with a sort of sweet naivety, an inner strength and an outer straightforwardness. Her blistering, wine-soaked monologue to Ryan about his dad’s true nature was a standout moment of the final season, when her pain bubbled over after several years of her stoic attempts to move on. On the surface, the mysterious, enticing femme fatale that is Anna in Obsession couldn’t be less like Ann (though as the story unfolds there are more and more parallels between them). Anna seduces her fiance’s dad and point-blank refuses to tell her soon-to-be-husband anything about her past. Anna has the keys to a fancy flat in the centre of town, perfect for illicit liaisons involving rules, bondage and shagging anywhere that isn’t a bed.  

Murphy appears on my screen with a new shock of platinum blonde hair, drawing a definitive line between her and either character. She’s in the middle of an online junket, perched on the edge of a sofa in a nondescript hotel room and peering down at her screen, smiling. Having grown up as one of six children in southeast Ireland, she speaks with a gentle Irish lilt and is curious but careful with my questions, steering them back to her talking points and careful not to give too much of herself away.

Her character in Obsession is similarly guarded, but she certainly isn’t coy. She pursues William and is in control of all aspects of their relationship, except the moments they’re alone together in the sex flat – but that too is her decision: she hands him the power. Murphy describes her character as a “dominant submissive”.

“At times [she is] his mother, his lover, his sexual spiritual guide, and architect of this brand new world that he’s been born into – and at the same time, his drug giver.” It feels unusual to see BDSM represented in pop culture in a way that is actually quite sexy. The shots are sweeping, the bodies sculptural (that’s intentional, Murphy explains: she and Armitage were inspired by Renaissance art), and the music is overwhelmingly dramatic.

Murphy reckons part of the reason the sex in Obsession actually feels sensual and somewhat realistic is down to the female-led creative team and the inclusive, collaborative atmosphere they created. Writer Morgan Lloyd Malcolm “really reordered this world; took a very not female heavy perspective and swung it the other way”, she says. Lloyd Malcolm and her writing partner Benji Walters eschewed the exclusively male point of view of both the original book and the subsequent 1992 film starring Jeremy Irons, and instead split it down the middle: sometimes we’re as hopelessly intrigued by Anna as William is, sometimes we’re as disappointed by William’s lack of control as Anna is.  

Directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, a husband-and-wife team, also fostered a much more collaborative way of working than Murphy had been used to. “It was a very theatrical process, which you don’t normally get [in TV],” she says. “When I read [the script], it felt like Anna kept just being out of reach, she was a real puzzle.” She, Lloyd Malcolm, Barros D’Sa and Leyburn worked out the character together in pre-production, finding answers such as, “this is the psychological drive at this point as to why their sex is a bit rougher and the next one is a bit softer. We figured all of that out together which gave us autonomy very early on with our characters.”  

Of course, this is a Netflix show and not a French arthouse film, so it’s a pretty PG portrayal of a kink – one reliant on lingering shots of William tying ribbons around Anna’s wrists and long meaningful eye contact, before a quick, boisterous shag up against a wall. And, in an era of open discussion about kinks and sexual adventurousness, polyamory and “ethical non-monogamy” (the acronym for which you will find on almost every east London man’s Tinder profile), the love triangle plot and fleeting shots of thundering flesh can feel almost outdated.  

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But the brooding drama is compelling, and its Hitchcockian heightening of tension is almost unbearable, as intended: an affair with your son’s girlfriend is never going to end neatly and this one certainly doesn’t. But as the layers are peeled back you’ll find your sympathies shifting constantly, never quite sure of who you feel is most deserving of a big hug, a warm blanket and a cup of tea (although I will say it is almost never William, who at one point caused me to jot down: “Is he going to shag that cushion?” and then two minutes later, “Yes.” The scene was partly improvised, according to Armitage, who said “I was really conscious that it shouldn’t be in any way comedic”.).  

Such scenes required a pair of actors who were very game and committed. Murphy and Armitage met for the first time at their chemistry read. “He fed me a few olives and then we shook hands and said goodbye,” she jokes. At first they would keep their distance on set, wanting to maintain a similar arc to their characters who know very little about each other aside from their intense physical attraction. Then they spent a week together filming their intimate scenes, which made it almost impossible not to develop at the very least a jovial comradery. “It was a nice parallel because no one else had witnessed it except this very close crew, so after that we had these loaded looks in our public scenes together: eating dinner, touching hair and all that. We’d experienced our world already.”  

Equally important to the process was intimacy coordinator Adelaide Waldrop. Intimacy coordinators are a relatively new presence on film sets, helping to choreograph the physical sex scenes and ensure the safety of the actors who put themselves in incredibly vulnerable situations to tell us a story. “So often you’re drawing from yourself, so that can feel icky,” Murphy says, recoiling slightly. “It’s like saying, ‘OK, get up there and do a dance’. You’re like, ‘OK, well, now it’s Charlie doing the dance. And I’m feeling a bit self-conscious’. It’s the same with sex scenes. I’ve never really had any bad, bad experiences, thank God – and we all know that there’s been loads out there – but it has given me more bravery to know that I have an armour on in some way, even if I’m fully nude. That people are watching, not me going, ‘Oh, this is me, I’m drawing from my own very personal sexual experience’.”

Perhaps this is why she’s slightly flustered by the one question I ask that veers anywhere near Murphy’s life as opposed to Anna’s. Her response to whether the show taught her anything about sexual dynamics turns into an answer about work: “In my own personal life? I think what I learned the most was on set, feeling like an adult, like my opinion counted...”

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In real life, in fact, she’s “pretty shy actually”. “When I’m sitting around my sisters and my family, I’m like, ‘Why have I chosen this career? To invite this upon myself’,” Murphy ponders, talking about being nude in front of thousands of people and accessing parts of herself that most of us keep hidden. But playing Anna has been empowering for her: not just slipping into the skin of a woman who twists the world so as to give herself control, but also the cogs and processes behind the scenes that keep the story turning. She’s probably not going to seduce her partner’s dad, but she knows now that she wants a bit more of that control for herself. “It was really fun to explore that dominant-submissive powerplay – then the signs of his obsession, the signs of her questioning it. Each time we could go a little bit more with the danger.” She grins, eyes twinkling and that newly-bleached hair looking wild, untamed. “It was really, really fun.”

‘Obsession’ is on Netflix