Bella Thorne makes directorial debut with a short film for Pornhub
We’ve gone on the record in the past as being giant fans of the endless, swirling miasma of insanity that is Bella Thorne’s Instagram feed. Yes, she’s an actor, and yes, she’s quite good in some things, even when the movies themselves are not that good. (Okay, Assassination Nation was decent.) But pure, unfiltered absurdity in the form of Thorne’s direct-to-camera ramblings is far superior—and now, it looks like she may have turned that over-sharing imagination into putting out a short film—for Pornhub, no less.
The actor/social media star/aspiring label mogul/makeup promoter/sort-of musician has directed her first short film (of the non-music video kind, anyway), “Her & Him,” for the online pornography repository. Plot-wise, it sounds pretty straightforward, albeit with actual sex involved: “‘Her & Him’ depicts an edgy twenty-something guy who stumbles upon a surprise text in his girlfriend’s phone, interrupting their morning routine and spinning everything into an out-of-control sexually charged encounter.” But judging from the brief glimpses of it seen in this behind-the-scenes interview with Thorne that doubles as the short’s trailer, it’s exactly the kind of lurid, ludicrous combination of first student film and short-attention-span theater absurdity you would hope for.
“My vision originally actually was to make a Christmas horror movie, and instead I made a very beautiful, ethereal, neon type of vision,” Thorne explains, sitting in a location draped in all-pink frills (even the chairs!) with a giant velociraptor statue behind her, which we are happy to report is the honest-to-god living room in her self-designed home, bless her heart. “Sometimes, you go into something thinking that you want something specific, and then you totally change your mind and don’t go with that idea at all,” she elaborates, as though an unexpected tonal clash of everything from wardrobe to evening activity wasn’t part of her daily, possibly hourly, routine.
“I’m really lucky that Pornhub wanted to come on and produce this with me,” Thorne says in detailing the lengthy development process for “Her & Him.” Surely, she speaks truth: noble Pornhub, willing to sacrifice a small amount of money to do a splashy and attention-getting short with one of the biggest social-media stars in America; it’s the kind of selfless nonprofit commitment to artistic vision that makes the NEA look like a greedy pile of puke. Anyway, “Her & Him” will be available for you to watch on Pornhub Premium following its debut next month at Germany’s Oldenburg Film Festival, though whatever Bella Thorne is doing this exact moment—even if it’s something as banal and “all in a day’s work” for her as just brushing her teeth in the middle of an EDM rave while designing inflatable baseball hats, or whatever—is probably being uploaded to Instagram as we speak.