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Dying for Sex put Rob Delaney through it — emotionally speaking.
Adapted for the screen by co-creators Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether, the FX limited series recounts the real-life story of best friends Nikki Boyer and Molly Kochan. The pair support each other after Molly’s life is turned upside down by a terminal stage 4 metastatic breast cancer diagnosis, sending her on a journey of sexual exploration before she dies.
Along the way, Molly (portrayed by Michelle Williams) encounters a neighbor referred to as Guy (Delaney, 48) who enjoys being sexually humiliated. Throughout the series, their sexual exploits grow more and more intense as they get to know each other.
Explaining why he signed on for the hilarious yet heartbreaking series, Delaney tells PEOPLE it was simple. “The creative team involved. I mean, you got Liz Meriwether, Kim Rosenstock, [director] Shannon Murphy and Michelle Williams producing in addition to starring.”
“So I was like, ‘Yep, I’ll do it.’ They were like, ‘Do you wanna read it?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know why I would read it. I don’t need to,'” the actor recalls. “But then, in doing it, the challenges and the emotional paces we were put through, I mean, I cried a lot on set.”
“I mean, like, liters of tears because it was so realistic, because Michelle’s so amazing, because the story is true and then brilliantly rendered by Kim and Liz and Shannon. So it was brutal,” he continues.
Because of that, the Deadpool actor says he needed “a detox period” after filming the series. “I called Nick Offerman after this and I was like, ‘Nick, you’re a real actor. How do you decompress after something like this that’s so emotionally difficult?'”
Sharing what Offerman — who recently won an Emmy for his guest starring role in an acclaimed episode of The Last of Us — said to him, “he talked about difficult stuff where he would have conversations with people he’d been acting with in the days and weeks afterwards,” Delaney recalls. “He was like, ‘Just make sure that you’re drinking enough water and sleeping and exercising and stuff like that.'”
On the set of Dying for Sex, Delaney says, “There were days where I would have to emotionally budget for the day and I’d be a bit of a zombie. I was like, ‘Okay, in an hour I’m gonna be in the fetal position on the floor of a hospital crying naked.”
“So it was very emotional and exhausting but I felt like we were getting good stuff in the can at the end of every day so it felt worthwhile. And to be honest, everybody was working so hard. I haven’t on anything where everyone was so united in trying to tell the story in the most loving and honest manner,” the actor says, adding, “It was very difficult emotionally and I’m glad that it was because the show demanded that.”
Having gone through a similar situation on the set of Prime Video’s Transparent, Jay Duplass (who portrays Molly’s husband, Steve) says that he and his former costars, Amy Landecker and Gaby Hoffmann, “started doing deprogramming for each other after the show.”
While “it wasn’t as heavy lifting as this,” he says, “I’ve never done anything this heavy lifting before, but on Transparent there was a lot of upheaval going on and so after season 2, I think we realized we needed to start moving out of our characters and back into life.”
“We would do similar stuff, like just a little bit of deprogramming and checking in and some woo woo stuff,” Duplass, 52, explains, saying that he was able to go from that character he played back to being a dad and enjoying his life.
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Dying for Sex is now streaming on Hulu.
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