In the dark comedy “Honey Don’t!” private detective Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) investigates a suspicious death that leads her to a narcissistic reverend (Chris Evans) and his mysterious church.
The film, which debuts Aug. 22 and stars Margaret Qualley in the lead role, is the second installment of married couple Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s lesbian-centric trilogy. Last year’s “Drive-Away Dolls,” a raunchy road-trip comedy starring Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan and Beanie Feldstein, was the first.
Early in her career, Cooke edited many of the films her husband directed with his brother, Joel (the renowned duo often simply referred to as the “Coen Brothers”), including “The Big Lebowski” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” But for this film she joined her spouse in the writers’ room. In addition to their films, their unique relationship has also made headlines: Cooke is a lesbian, Coen is straight, they share two children and have been in a platonic union for more than 30 years.
Cooke said that in “Honey Don’t!” which her husband directed, it was her mission to make lesbian protagonists visible within the noir genre.
“Ethan and I are both big noir fans. It was a genre that made sense to us — in, like, a classic B-movie genre” she told NBC News. But, she added, “I couldn’t think of any noir genre movies that were lesbian or queer-themed.”
Cooke was also inspired by the butch-femme dynamic and wanted to “switch the gender norms” in “Honey Don’t!”
“Instead of it being like the masculine male detective, it would be great if the very feminine character was the detective, and the more butch character was the femme fatale,” she said of her initial thought process.
Honey’s wardrobe is largely feminine, though edgier fashion icons — like Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn — served as inspiration for her wardrobe, Cooke said. Though the location of the story, a landlocked Southern California city, did present some sartorial limitations.
“Honey’s a detective in Bakersfield, so she couldn’t look that good. She couldn’t look that styled because we wanted her to feel realistic,” Cooke added.
The main character also uses her feminine wiles, charisma and flowery dresses to disarm her opponents and catch them off guard to her benefit, so she can hit them hard with her sharp investigative skills. Her charm proves successful in getting information from those ranging from a slimy megachurch reverend (Evans) to a deadpan cop with whom she shares a steamy romance (Aubrey Plaza).
Cooke revealed that Plaza’s character, MG Falcone, was initially intended to be more masculine but was reworked to better fit Plaza’s casting. Honey, Cooke added, was inspired by a friend of hers who once managed a sex shop.
Similarly to “Drive-Away Dolls,” “Honey Don’t!” embraces women’s sexuality. Honey and MG share a vibrant chemistry, or, as Cooke refers to it, “a classic femme-butch attraction.”
“We definitely wanted it to feel sexy. We wanted there to be a lot of sex in the movie. Everyone has it,” she said.
While “everyone has it,” the tone is different across the narrative. Cooke said the reverend’s sex scenes were meant to be a bit ridiculous, while the scenes between Honey and MG were intended to be sexy, with the first of their steamy scenes inspired by “Basic Instinct.”
“We wanted them to feel sexual tension from the beginning, like it was a big spark in both of their lives,” Cooke said. “We just tried to write things that felt like, ‘OK, this makes sense. They’re really into each other.’”
As for the film’s location, Cooke, who was raised in Southern California, said she and Coen wanted to deviate from the typically grim environments of noir films and use the backdrop of sun-drenched Bakersfield.
“We thought visually it would be interesting. Also, there’s a bit of a bleakness — not to the city, but just the landscape there — that felt right for that type of story,” she said.
But while the film’s opening was actually shot in Bakersfield, most of the film was shot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the Coen Brothers shot “True Grit” and “No Country for Old Men.” Cooke noted that some of Albuquerque’s background terrain, such as its mountains, had to be edited out.
With “Honey Don’t” about to hit theaters, Cooke and Coen are now working on the final installment of their sapphic trilogy: “Go Beavers.” Cooke said the script is in its early stages and is about “a crew team who gets together for their reunion, and they start dying off one by one.” However, Cooke noted, she’s not a fan of horror and is hoping to steer the story in a different direction, one that is specifically inspired by the 1971 Australian outback survival film “Walkabout.”
“That film is whoa, psychedelic. What is life?” Cooke said. “It has a little more depth, so we’re thinking about taking it in that direction.”
