The latest film from director-actor Scott Coffey takes place in a sex shop, but that isn’t the only reason why it is titled “Adult World.” The film stars Emma Roberts as Amy, a college graduate struggling to make it as a poet, who begins working at a sex shop where she meets a cast of
interesting characters.
In a roundtable interview, Roberts, Coffey and co-star Evan Peters (“American Horror Story”) discussed making the film.
Amy is naive, neurotic and high-strung — traits that Roberts was fully capable of bringing to the character.
“I was going through a lot of the crises Amy was going through,” Roberts said. “Like, ‘Where is my life going?’ kind of thing, so it was kind of cool to have that moment captured on film. In a sense … you feel like an adult your whole life, and then you’re actually in the real world and you’re like, ‘Where’s my mom? What am I going to do? Oh, I have to go buy my own paper towel rolls, this sucks.’ It’s like when you first become an adult you start regressing a little bit before you really make it over the hump into becoming an adult.”
Peters plays the role of Alex, a fellow sex shop employee who helps Amy transition into adulthood.
“I thought it was cool that it was a love interest that worked in a porn shop, and he was a little different and odd,” Peter said when asked why he was attracted to the role. “And obviously working with Emma was a huge plus, too. I was like, ‘Man, she’s super hot, I want to work with her.’”
Peters and Roberts developed more than just on-screen chemistry, and the two are now dating.
“Emma and Evan fell in love, and they’re together now, and I saw that start,” Coffey said. “I saw that happen before they did. I knew it was going to happen.”
“[Working with Peters] was awesome,” Roberts said. “I was such a fan of him in ‘American Horror Story.’ I’m obsessed with that show, so I was really excited to get to work with him. He’s so good in the movie and so cute. It was really fun.”
Coffey said he hopes people who see the film “recognize themselves in the characters and can relate to them.”
Roberts, who is a fan of HBO’s “Girls,” acknowledged the film conveys a similar theme.
“I feel like I come from a generation of girls and boys where everybody wants to be doing creative things, and no one thinks that they’re not the best, and I think it’s kind of that awakening that even if you are [the best], things still can go wrong,” she said. “This generation of kids all want the same things, and it either goes really well or really bad or somewhere in the middle.”
Roberts said the experience of working on “Adult World” has left a lasting impact on her.
“It’s definitely one of those movies that’s really close to me,” Roberts said. “A lot of times you work on projects where you just do it and it’s done and you never think about it again, and this movie stayed with me. I love it.”
Ife Olujobi is a staff writer. Email her at [email protected].
