The making of Supersex, Netflix’s most explicit show ever: ‘We wanted to dive into the core of masculinity’

 Rocco Siffredi is one of the world’s most prolific adult film stars, having appeared in more than 1,300 X-rated movies. Now his life has been turned into a provocative new drama series. James Mottram speaks to the show’s cast and crew – and Siffredi himself – to find out how they got away with it

occo Siffredi is an emblem, he’s an icon, he is the cock of the Western culture,” says Francesca Manieri, the filmmaker behind the Netflix drama Supersex, about one of history’s most prolific porn stars. “My goal was to put men in front of themselves. This is what we call the phallocentric system, the system in which the d*** is the centrum of the thought before everything. So what can you do right now, [in] 2024, to understand the relationship between men and women? And how can men put themselves in front of the image of their symbolic d*** and try to deconstruct all of this?”

These are the lofty aims of Supersex, a Netflix seven-parter inspired by Siffredi’s life. The star of more than 1,300 adult films, Siffredi retired from on-camera sex in 2004 – then returned to action five years later, then claimed to have once again stepped back from performing in 2022. In Supersex, Rocco Tano (played by Alessandro Borghi) is a boy growing up in the coastal Italian town of Ortona, who rises through the adult film industry like a rocket. Re-named Rocco Siffredi after the Alain Delon character in the 1970 gangster movie Borsalino, he stars in 1987 hit provocatively titled Sodopunition pour dépravées sexuelles and becomes a star.

I meet Siffredi in the ballroom of a Berlin hotel, and find a 59-year-old reflecting with some uncertainty the events of his life. “You have family, you have a wife, you have children and you never stop thinking, ‘Did I do the right thing or not?’” Tears begin to well in his eyes.

Among genre connoisseurs, Siffredi sits alongside John Holmes and Ron Jeremy as one of the top males in porn. But he suggests it came at a cost. “I was scared because I started in a business where everybody said, ‘What the f*** are you doing?’. They go to my family, ‘Why did you let him do this?’. I said, ‘I want to be this guy. I want to do this all my life. I will never change.’” The only person he didn’t want to hurt was his mother. “Because she already suffered too much herself. But when she said, ‘Don’t worry, do it’ – against everybody, even members of the family – I said, ‘I’m ready to f*** the world.’”

Siffredi certainly had a good go of it, with his partners numbering in the thousands (he did, for a time, experience sex addiction). The question is, post-#MeToo, can you even make a compelling, unironic drama about a real-life porn star? Supersex, at least, is the product of a woman – Manieri identifies as a feminist, and previously co-created the celebrated coming-of-age limited series We Are Who We Are with Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name). She argues that her plan was to “really deep dive [into] the core of masculinity”, as they unpacked the life of a skin flick legend.