It wasn’t very long into my conversation with Jordan Firstman that we found ourselves pondering the question: would it help or hinder one very famous actress’s career if she were caught getting spit-roasted in public? It’s not something that many famous people have to worry about, but for Jordan, he has to stay vigilant.
“No amount of fame will stop me from sucking dick in public,” he tells me over Zoom. “I like sucking dick on the dance floor, and I’m not going to give that up because I’m famous.” Jordan has a level of openness around his sex life that feels totally out of step with what we expect from our stars. Therefore, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that when the Chilean director Sebastián Silva asked Jordan whether he would be open to having real sex in his latest film, Rotting in the Sun, Jordan jumped at the chance.
“Getting hard and staying hard when you’re working on a chaotic movie like this… like we were filled to the brim with Viagra and still furiously masturbating between takes.” Jordan goes on to lament the strict conditions genuine porn actors must work under. “Most porn companies do drug testing, and you can’t be drunk. For the orgy scene, they sent us down with a bag of K and a bottle of Mezcal and told us to go get to know each other.”
But to paint Rotting in the Sun as an unsimulated sex fest would be doing the film a complete disservice. “In America, after Sundance specifically, we became ‘the movie with 30 dicks in it’. And it’s like, did you watch the movie? There are actually 32. There’s a dog dick and a statue of David.”
It may come as a surprise to many to see Jordan Firstman in a leading role in a feature film. To many, Jordan is that dude from Instagram who we all watched during lockdown. You know, banana bread’s publicist? But much like how Rotting in the Sun is about much more than dicks, Jordan is so much more than his Instagram.
Growing up gay and Jewish in Long Island, Jordan tells me his first idol as a kid was Stephen Sondheim. Then, he was introduced to the films of Woody Allen and Sarah Silverman’s legendary stand-up comedy show Jesus Is Magic. “She was my queen, [that show] totally changed the game for me.” In his late teens, he watched Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, leading to an obsession with Paul Mazursky and the comedies of the 60s and 70s.
“When I moved to LA, I was taking acting classes, and I was quickly like, oh, I do not fit in here, these people are losers. Then I started doing comedy, and I was like, oh, these people are mean, I don’t fit in here either.” Unable to find a home for his style of Silverman and Mazursky-inspired humour, Jordan decided to make a short film. Called The Disgustings, it did pretty well on the gay festival circuit. It led him to find his crowd among indie film people. “They’re my people more than anybody else. I liked them the best. So I kept doing that.” Fast forward about 10 years, and Jordan is the lead of a film that opened at Sundance and is about to be released worldwide on MUBI.
Rotting in the Sun is the latest release from Sebastián Silva, a director best known for the strange Michael Cera-led comedy Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and the Golden Globe-nominated The Maid. It tells the story of Sebastián (a pastiche of the director played by Sebastián himself), who lives in a fog of drugs and decides to escape to a gay beach resort in order to clear his head. Whilst there, he runs into Jordan, an annoying Instagram comedian who keeps trying to get Sebastián to help him make a television series about his life. Jordan plagues Sebastián’s life, continuing to do so even when Sebastián openly tells Jordan about how embarrassing both his life and content is. Many of the aspects of the film were inspired by real life, including Sebastián’s antagonism toward Jordan’s works.
“The first time I met Sebastián properly, we were having dinner with friends; it was at the height of my Instagram thing, so they were talking about it around the table. Throughout, Sebastián was like, ‘why the fuck are you guys talking about Instagram? This is so stupid.’ Then, a month later, he called me after meeting me once, and he was like, ‘hey dude, I just looked at your Instagram, and it’s super embarrassing. Aren’t you embarrassed to do that?’”
Jordan being Jordan, he wholly agreed with Sebastián’s assessment of his career. But from Sebastián’s utter dislike of Jordan came an idea. He suggested they make a movie where he gets to just be incredibly mean about Jordan and his career. “Not even in an ironic way,” Jordan says, recounting what Sebastián told him on the call. “I really just want to actually make fun of you as a person.” A couple of months later, as Jordan puts it, he was sucking cocks in Mexico.
Rotting in the Sun’s brash sexuality is exciting to witness. It feels like the film was made wholly to prove the ridiculousness of the current discourse around the function of sex in film. The sex is completely necessary to Rotting, not just to further the plot but to provide context, motivation and drama. “It probably isn’t for the Heartstopper audience,” Jordan quips. “I think working-class people will relate to this movie way more than a corporate baddie who goes to media for comfort.”
It’s true, dicks and Instagram aside, Rotting in the Sun is a searing portrayal of class inequality in Mexico. But also suicide, existential dread, addiction and queerness. Hence why becoming “the movie with 30 dicks in it” came as such a shock to Sebastián and Jordan. “We thought we had made this profound work of art, and it became the movie with the dicks in it. So, now in the marketing, we’ve flipped that, let people believe it’s a movie about dicks.” Baiting audiences with the promise of chode is something, I feel, more filmmakers should do. Let’s hope Jordan has started a trend.
Credits
Photography Spyros Rennt