One would be hard-pressed to find anything in common between two of the summer’s more notable indies: David Cronenberg’s dystopian horror flick Crimes of the Future and Lena Dunham’s satirical sex comedy Sharp Stick.
Each movie is provocative in its own way. Cronenberg dares the viewer to stick around as Viggo Mortenson offers up his own organs for excavation, while Dunham’s film centers around a virginal twentysomething who arranges to have random men come over for anal sex and bukkake. And each one stars an actor playing against type, with Kristen Stewart as a mousy (and horny) research assistant in Crimes of the Future, and Dunham herself as a Silicon Valley-type matriarch in Sharp Stick.
The films’ one uniting factor is a perhaps more surprising piece of casting: an actor who appears in both movies, playing radically different roles. This summer, Scott Speedman is having a moment—and not one that those who love him from his teen drama days would expect.
While watching Speedman—known as the emotionally unavailable love interest on Felicity to a certain generation, and one of the hot guys on You or Grey’s Anatomy to another—offer up his dead son’s corpse for the sake of performance art in Crimes of the Future is incredibly bizarre, it’s his work in Sharp Stick that he was far more “freaked out” by.
“Sharp Stick was this scarier role,” Speedman told The Daily Beast last week, ahead of Sharp Stick’s theatrical release this Friday. “The porn aspect, and what I was gonna have to do… like, what were the porn scenes gonna be? Did I really wanna do all that?”
Speedman plays porn star Vance Leroy, whom our naive heroine Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) becomes obsessed with. He’s a perfect choice for awkward girls dipping their toe into the PornHub catalog: a non-threatening sexpot, who knows how to make a girl feel good in every possible way.
“[Vance is] very sweet and nice—the anti-porn star, basically,” Speedman said. “He has an OnlyFans account and talks to his [co-stars] in certain ways. He’s very supportive, and that kind of made me laugh.”
Speedman’s role is mostly limited to watching Sarah Jo watch him on OnlyFans, complimenting his partners in ways both sexy and strangely wholesome. His wholesomeness is so intrinsic to his character that Vance delivers an affirming, hilarious monologue toward the end of the movie. Sarah Jo, at her lowest point, sends Vance a heartfelt letter, thanking him for helping her embrace her sexuality. His video response in return is Sharp Stick’s best scene, a pep talk for the ages: Even if Sarah Jo feels like she doesn’t know what she’s doing in the bedroom, Vance says, it’s all gonna be OK. “Nobody is a sex genius,” he tells her. And he should know: He’s paid to have sex with people.
While Speedman’s Sharp Stick performance is limited to just a few scenes—”We shot [for] one day,” he said—the actor has received raves for it. Since the film’s Sundance premiere, critics have referred to his performance as “just incredible,” “hilarious,” and “wonderful.” Those glowing reactions are unsurprising to viewers, but Speedman accepts them sheepishly. (He doesn’t even want his own mom to see it, he said—too embarrassing.)
“‘Yes’ has become a lot more part of my vocabulary,” he said, explaining why a role that requires him to be mostly naked on camera is something he willed himself to take on. “When stuff like this comes along, I used to tear my hair out… Now I’m just more likely to jump in and go for it, and see where it takes me.”
Vance Leroy definitely sticks out in Speedman’s filmography, especially for his biggest fans. But at the same time, Vance could be an alternate-universe version of Ben Covington, his breakout role on the early-2000s college kid drama Felicity. Ben was, not totally unlike Vance, a bad boy who’s also a sweetie. Most memorably, Ben fell in love with Felicity (Keri Russell), competing for her affections with classic nice guy Noel (Scott Foley). That meant the Felicity-identifying viewers were in love with Ben too, even if he also caused a lot of heartbreak.
In fact, part of why I wanted to chat with Speedman in the first place was that one of my best friends is a Ben Covington die-hard. She texted me hyper-specific, Felicity-related questions to ask him, most of which I didn’t bring up, out of fear of freaking the actor out. (Sorry, Sam.)
But Speedman definitely recognizes that there are still plenty of Felicity fans out there, for whom Ben was their first teen crush. “I’ve got mothers and daughters now coming up to me, moms that watched [Felicity] 20 years ago, and then their daughters are watching it now. So that’s cool. I’m happy about that.”
(In case you’re wondering, he thought it was “kinda funny” when Keri Russell infamously cut her beautiful curls off between the show’s first and second seasons. When he saw Russell, whom he was dating at the time, with her new buzzcut, “I told her it looked like a chia pet on her head,” he said.)
But what Speedman hopes his fans will start bringing up to him, in a perfect world, is his work in Crimes of the Future. He plays a dad grieving the murder of his young son; the boy’s mother kills their child after getting fed up with his ravenous hunger for inedible objects. Speedman’s character ends up offering his son’s body up to Viggo Mortensen’s character, a renowned performance artist whose body and organs are his canvas. Speedman wants Mortensen to surgically pry open his son’s body like he does to his own, so that the boy’s damaged insides can be shown off to sickly curious spectators as part of Mortensen’s act.
It’s gross, but Speedman loved it.
“I had a lot of fun making that movie,” he said. “Part of it was getting to work with Cronenberg, who’s the nicest, sweetest, most open and generous man [that] I’ve worked with. He’s incredible. And the cast was so top-notch—for me that that was exciting unto itself.” Along with Kristen Stewart, Speedman got to work opposite award-winning stars Mortensen and Lea Seydoux.
To be clear, he found the role itself emotionally taxing. But the set was surprisingly lighthearted, and the work was something he remains fiercely proud of. As a man whose new motto is “Yes,” Speedman’s excitement about working on a typically Cronenbergian body-horror fright fest certainly tracks.
The big question: Speedman won’t let his mom see Sharp Stick, but what about Crimes of the Future? He wants her to watch it, but that’s probably not happening, either.
“We were in Toronto for the [Crimes of the Future] premiere”—his mother lives in the city—“and my mom was like, I think [I’m good.]”
