To prepare for her first big role in a television drama, Siena Kelly was sent to a porn set in Kent by Channel 4. “We left before the sex started, but we were there for four hours,” she says. It may seem a rather unusual way to prepare for a role, but since she is playing a porn star in Adult Material, it was the perfect place to start.
“I remember thinking to myself: ‘How it is this girl going to have sex? It is fucking freezing in here, and the food being really bland: Tesco sandwiches and biscuits.’” I ask what the catering was like on set for when it got round to filming the show. “I mean set food is never …” she laughs. “Well, it’s the same thing, people think being on set is really glamorous, but it’s not.”
Kelly has a great laugh, which matches her cheeky sense of humour and energy. At 24, she’s stepping into (what should be) a really exciting moment in her career having landed a great role as a troubled young porn performer in a provocative show about the British porn industry, which is no doubt going to get people talking. But in April when we first speak via Zoom, the show’s release, along with the rest of the world, is on hold. “I feel like everyone’s being so productive,” she says, “and I’m just lying on my bed for most of the day.” But living with her five flatmates in Tottenham, not far from where she grew up, has helped provide stability. “The hallway always smells of cat poo, but there’s a lot of love in the house.”
Kelly always knew she wanted to perform, and loved the glamour of Hollywood musicals. “I used to be obsessed with Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand,” she confesses with a giggle. “I was not good in my French classes, and my teacher pulled me aside and was like: ‘Siena, you need to get good French GCSEs so you can go to uni.’ And I was like: ‘I’m not going to uni, miss, I’m going to be on stage.’”
Having focused primarily on dance and musical theatre, Kelly came to the realisation that perhaps the reality of the job might not live up to the fantasy after landing her “dream job” in On the Town at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre. “Most of the time, in that part of the industry, it’s year-long contracts, and going into a show that’s already been running for a long time. So really, you’re just stepping into someone else’s shoes and I didn’t want to do that … And I didn’t like how much of it was based on looking young and pretty with fluttering eyelashes. So I started to go more towards acting and then ended up here.”
Adult Material seems about as far away from a Hollywood musical as you can get. Hayley Squires plays a British porn star, Jolene Dollar, who has been in the game for more than a decade, juggling motherhood with being a Milf on camera. She tries to take Kelly’s character, Amy, under her wing when they meet on Amy’s first day on a set. Without revealing too much, let’s just say that the show is dark, at times, difficult to watch, but also humanising, powerful and funny. “It’s a conversation,” says Kelly. “I don’t feel like Adult Material is telling you one thing, like ‘porn is bad’. It’s more a thought piece and it makes you question things.”
That is reflected in the conversations the show has already sparked between Kelly and her friends. “What was really interesting were all the grey areas … I showed it to a [male] friend, and there was a scene which in my head, wasn’t a consensual thing. But he was like: ‘What was wrong?’”
In that, the show has similarities with Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You or I Hate Suzie, raising difficult but necessary questions around taboos of our time, and putting women at the centre of that discussion. “I knew from the start that the show had a female writer, a female director and a female director of photography, as well as a lot of female producers. The four main leads are women as well,” says Kelly. “I am a woman’s woman … so that also made me feel very comfortable.”
There was also an intimacy coordinator, whose job was to help ensure actors were safe and looked after while doing sex scenes – a role that has been seen as indispensable in the post #MeToo world. Speaking with actors on set who had never worked with an intimacy coach before, such as Julian Ovenden, who plays a US porn juggernaut, Tom Pain, made Kelly realise that she was extremely lucky to have them on hand. “He was telling me that, most of the time, directors are quite awkward about [sex scenes] … and say: ‘Just go ahead and do what you think.’ I’d heard that and was so glad that I didn’t have to just pull out all my own moves … what if I’m too much or, what if I’m not enough?”
Thankfully, a lot of thought went into choreographing the sex scenes. “We’d be talking about what were we trying to say with this scene, what were we trying to show with this kind of sex, how did we think these two characters would do this? What were they trying to do with each other? So it never felt like me, Siena, having to like pretend to have sex with someone.”
That peace of mind gave Kelly the space to do her own research into the world of porn. “I listened to every podcast I could find, every interview, every documentary, every whistleblowing article and the other side of it, the people who are like: ‘I love working in porn.’” Jon Ronson’s podcast The Butterfly Effect was a particular eye-opener. “I never thought about how free internet porn affects people in the industry,” she says. “I’d always think about it in terms of how porn affects the consumers and our sexuality, and rewires our brains, or what we are attracted to and what’s normalised. But I’d never thought about the amount of piracy that happens in porn and how people are not getting paid. That was all news to me.”
The process inevitably made Kelly think hard about the pros and cons to porn. “It’s a great way for people to explore kinks and things that they don’t feel yet comfortable to explore in real life. They can do that online,” she says. “But I don’t think it’s good for sex education … I went through puberty with free internet porn that was very easily accessible for me. I don’t think that’s good.”
When I catch up with Kelly in September, several things have changed. “I’ve got lockdown, down,” she says over the phone. Realising that things aren’t going back to normal any time soon she has decided to be proactive. “You can write: ‘I’ve got out of bed, finally,’ which is an achievement,” she laughs. While the rest of us have long since waved goodbye to our daily exercise plans, Siena is just getting into the swing of hers, cooking and working on creative projects with her friends.
I ask if she has been excited to see the show being advertised on TV – but that seems to bring her little joy. “I’m so far removed from it now,” she says. “It was so long ago that I’m not even nervous or anything.”
Three of her flatmates have had to move out since April, a headache to deal with in lockdown. “It was so hard getting people [to move in] because everyone’s just gone back home to their actual home,” she says, expressing just one of the struggles that young people are having to grapple with.
Still, we are both trying to find silver linings. People are spending more time at home, so maybe that will mean good things for the viewing figures, I suggest. “People must be watching more porn now right?” she adds. “I’m assuming they must be? During lockdown, especially when we couldn’t go out on dates or anything.” She laughs, but we both know she’s not joking.
