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How does a porn star become an indie-film darling? Sasha Grey, with diminutive features and a melancholy expression, never looked like a typical porn star, but watching her 2006 debut film, Fashionistas Safado: The Challenge, you'd be hard-pressed to pick her out as a future mainstream star. (Her co-stars might've noticed something different; the eighteen-year-old Grey reportedly shocked porn veteran Rocco Siffredi by asking him to punch her in the stomach during fellatio.) But Grey's persona grew as the mainstream press noticed her penchant for discussing Godard instead of blowjobs in interviews. She was a deliberately highbrow anomaly in a genre not noted for elevated brows; she had even debated between Anna Karina and Sasha Grey when selecting her nom de porn, the former a reference to director Jean-Luc Godard’s ex-wife, the latter to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Her mainstreaming continued with an American Apparel modeling stint and an appearance on The Tyra Banks Show.

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Now she's starring in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, an exploration of five days in the life of an expensive Manhattan call girl. Grey's character offers her clients not only sex, but an entire relationship — the titular experience. Grey delivers a candid portrait of a prostitute wrestling with the ambiguities of her profession, with economic and emotional collapses hovering on the horizon. Nerve spoke with Grey about working with the Academy Award-winning Soderbergh, what her female fans make of her extreme depictions of sex, and what she plans to do next. — Michael Estrin


How did Steven Soderbergh approach you?
I got a MySpace message from Brian Koppelman, one of the writers. But since it was through MySpace, I didn’t think it was real. Brian wrote me a note saying that Steven Soderbergh would call me, and I was like, "Yeah, right." But a few days later I had a voicemail from Steven, which was a total surprise. A few days after that, we were having lunch and talking about the project. I think they had heard of me because of the Los Angeles Magazine story about me a few years ago.

What was it like to work with Soderbergh? How did he compare to other directors you’ve worked with in the past?
Very few people in porn can actually direct. I mean no disrespect, but in porn, if you can white-balance a camera, you can be a director, which is why the industry is so oversaturated with awful content.

Very few people in porn can actually direct.

Steven was amazing because he was so focused. He knows what he wants. That kind of made me feel lazy in a way. His process is so intense. You watch him do what he does and prepare, and you don’t feel like you work hard enough. Sometimes we did four locations in a single day. We had a very small crew. But with a small crew and a camera, Steven can do anything.

What did you think about the night before filming started?
I was incredibly nervous. We didn’t get a lot of information on the film, so I think I was nervous because I just didn’t know what it would be like. Steven wanted this organic, natural performance for the film. And that was a bit of a struggle for me, to let that be part of the process.

What was it like for you to do so much improv work?
I took acting lessons from [the ages of] twelve to eighteen, so it was hard for me to abandon some of those processes as an actor and to strip it down to something more raw. You know what you need to do in the scene, but you don’t have the lines to get you there, so you need to sort of figure it out. I got an outline. But there would generally be changes everyday because Steven wanted the film to be very real and in the moment. We would get to the set, pick up a newspaper, and talk about what was really going on in the world at that moment. A lot of that made it into the film.