Isabella Does Bug Porn

In a series of green shorts for SundanceChannel.com, Isabella Rossellini enthusiastically performs sex acts as an earthworm, a spider, a bee, and other invertebrates.

Isabella Rossellini is the type of woman who can do virtually anything and remain beloved. For Lancome, she used her enviable lips and cheekbones to sell makeup for fourteen years. For auteur filmmaker David Lynch, she participated in sex scenes that shocked and traumatized American audiences. And this year, she created a series of two-minute indie films about sex in the insect world for Robert Redford’s Sundance Channel. In the films, she dresses as various bugs and graphically describes their mating habits and genitalia. Did she alienate viewers? The network just confirmed that they’ve ordered a second season of the series, this time involving sea creatures. So, apparently, no.

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The series, titled Green Porno, is completely original and strangely hypnotic. Rossellini enthusiastically acts out various sex acts while costumed as an earthworm, a spider, a bee, and other invertebrates. Her goal is to both amuse and raise awareness of the animal kingdom’s beautiful diversity. She spoke to the Daily Beast about the project, and why the second installment might be even weirder.

Were you the type of child who collected insects and brought them back to your bedroom?

I’ve always been fascinated not only with insects but with animals in general ever since I was a little girl. I did have boxes of snails, aquariums with ants and flies and all that. That’s where I had all the information to write Green Porno.

From your childhood?

No just from throughout my life, I read a lot of books about animals, I take courses at university on biology or zoology, it’s always been an interest of mine.

Did you emerge from this project with a favorite insect sex act?

I don’t really have one. I’m not interested specifically in bug sex. I’m just interested in animals. What’s interesting to me is the infinite variety. One of the frustrations I have when I read these books is, sometimes they tell you about an animal that does something incredible, then they give you the name of the species and I am not clear what animal that is because it’s a latin name, or it’s a specific species of a subspecies, so I get lost. Or it’s a very exotic animal in Africa or Asia, a special bug I’ve never seen in my life. So I wanted to do very common animals [in Green Porno]. And I wanted it to be funny. My desired reaction to people watching Green Porno was to first laugh, and then to say, oh I didn’t know that about a fly, I didn’t know that about a snail.

Yeah, who knew that earthworms are hermaphrodites who have sex by 69’ing? Do you think it makes human sex seem a little boring?

I feel a little bit embarrassed. When I presented the film, a lot of people wanted to analyze my sex life or my sex pleasure, and to tell you the truth I think it’s a very genuine interest in biology, it’s not a twisted or unusual kinky way of me being interested in sex. I just thought that sex is an interesting subject because everybody’s interested in sex, that it would make a comical film, but to say to you, “Yes, my life sexually has been very strange,” I can’t say, first of all because I’m embarrassed to answer it, and also because I don’t think it is.

I didn’t mean your sex life personally, I just meant humans in general.

Listen, I took advantage of the fact that there’s a certain fixation in people about sex, and that’s why I called it Green Porno. I was very aware that the name was provocative, and there’s a lot of people coming to our site who think it’s porno, and then they get a nice little film. There’s a titillating interest in sex, and I took advantage of that in making a film about how the animals have sex instead of a film about how they take care of their babies. If we made a film called Different Ways To Be Mamas, we wouldn’t get the same hits.