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The Shards put effort into carefully — but accurately — portraying the fictionalized version of Bret Easton Ellis‘ sexual assault on screen.
During the Wednesday, September 2, episode of the FX show, Bret (Igby Rigney) is blackmailed with a tape that reveals he previously met up with girlfriend Debbie’s (Hayes Warner) dad, Terry (Wes Bentley), in a hotel room. As Bret narrated the memory, he acknowledged that his view of the situation has changed as he has gotten older.
“Wes was very specific and very active in the conversation,” Rigney, 23, exclusively told Us about how the cast and creative team approached the sensitive scene. “And I knew [cocreator] Ryan [Murphy] wanted that scene specifically to be treated with respect because it is unfortunately a situation that can and has happened and is very terrible for a young person to be placed in that particular situation.”
He continued: “We wanted to be really careful and just make sure that it wasn’t gratuitous or sexualized in any manner.”
Executive producer Brad Simpson offered more insight into the conversations that took place.
“It’s a big part of the book. It’s a big part of the character Bret’s experience, and I think it was a big part of an experience especially [for] gay men of a certain generation,” he told Us. “[In many cases] their first sexual experiences were either forced on them or were available to them were older men.”
Simpson pointed out how the show followed the troubling dynamic between Bret and Terry, adding, “Bret has been groomed all season by Terry — clearly — even though he doesn’t see it as grooming. People at that time looked at it differently. Like, if it happened to you, you looked at it differently. There wasn’t the sort of language of, ‘You’ve been assaulted’ for teen boys with older gay men. But it was important to Ryan that we depict it and we depict it with sensitivity but also with accuracy to remain true to the book.”
He added: “What he came up with I think hopefully threads the line in a way that works. We see Bret enter the Beverly Hills Hotel and we see him enter Terry’s room and we see what led up to it. Then we were in the bathroom with him making a decision to go in and also in the aftermath of that.”
The series pulled heavily from real-life author Ellis’ book of the same name.
“We really used a lot of the words from the book. A lot of the words he uses describe what happened instead of showing. It’s pretty graphic in the book, and we stayed pretty graphic because we thought that was important,” Simpson continued. “We adjusted some language to give the future Bret — the narrator — more self awareness over what this really was. Because I think the character in real time back in the 1980s, our character in the show is not seeing it as an assault. He’s seeing it as something he has to endure.”
The writing team wanted to balance how past Bret saw the incident with the way his adult self would describe the traumatic moment.
“Put your most intense stuff up-front, but we wanted the audience to be able to be prepared and be on Bret’s side. So hopefully, we handled it in the right way,” Simpson shared with Us. “There was never a conversation about not having it in. It was about knowing how to do it correctly, and nobody felt like we could actually show the sex act between this older man and this teenage boy on screen. We knew we couldn’t do that, but how do we get the graphicness of what happened to this character? And we decided going back to Bret’s words was the most effective way.”
The Shards, which airs Wednesdays, is an adaptation based on Ellis’ fictionalized memoir about his high school years. The 2023 release was Ellis’ first in 13 years and has a disclaimer stating that all the major players in The Shards are fictional — apart from the narrator.
Ellis, 62, previously addressed how he wrote about an incident where the book version of him was taken advantage of by a Hollywood producer.
“Gay men are different. Sorry, the gay world is different,” he said on a 2023 episode of his podcast when asked about the mentions of the dynamic in the book. “I didn’t really want to do it, but no negative feelings about it except that I didn’t get an agent and I didn’t get my script made.”
The Shards airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET on FX.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
