Mikko Mäkelä knew what he was setting himself up for when Sebastian, his second feature as a writer-director, has a novelist turn to the camera to exclaim, “You can ask me anything!” Starring Ruaridh Mollica as the Hackney-based author Max, Sebastian is about the ethics of writing, the quest for authenticity, the perils of delving too far into research – or perhaps none of that at all. The film is, after all, a piece of fiction, and the protagonist, Max, doesn’t even go by his real name for most of the story.
Not that Sebastian is another rehash of Adaptation or the many films about a writer staring at a blank Word document. More salaciously, Max is embarking on a piece of erotic autofiction: his second novel is about a young, male, gay sex worker in London, and to ensure his prose has the necessary depth, Max sets up a profile on an escort website, Dreamy Guys. Charging strangers by the hour, Max lives out a second life under the pseudonym of Sebastian and develops romantic feelings for an older client, Nicholas (Jonathan Hyde). Oblivious to Max’s real-life explorations, his publisher questions the book’s believability, remarking, “Is Sebastian, who has been so consumed by sex until now, really suddenly about to become all Harold and Maude with this guy?”
A 36-year-old Finnish filmmaker who swapped Lappeenranta for England as a teen, Mäkelä is speaking to me over coffee (he drinks coffee at 5pm) at Hackney Picturehouse a few weeks before the film’s cinema release. “I’d heard so many stories about people who hadn’t considered sex work, but then someone offered them money on Grindr,” he tells me of the screenplay’s origins. “This proposition is brought to them, rather than them seeking it out. There’s something about the use of apps for gay men that has blurred the line between sex work and hook-up culture.”
Most depictions of sex work in cinema focus on someone in debt, riddled with addiction, or simply forced into their career through external forces. For Sebastian, Mäkelä sought to prove there are alternative circumstances. Max already has a stable income as a novelist and a freelance journalist (he’s interviewing Bret Easton Ellis on the subject of queer authors mining their life for art), plus he derives pleasure from adopting his Sebastian persona in late-night encounters. The tension arrives from Nicholas, a figure in the literary world, recognising Max at an industry function. Still, why should it be more Max, not Nicholas, who fears being outed?
“There are lingering stigmas and received notions about sex workers being victims, or that every sex worker has a trauma that’s driven them into that work,” says Mäkelä. “People think: why should anyone choose sex work if they have other options? I wanted to counter those principles, and interrogate the idea of: why shouldn’t someone choose to do sex work, even if they could do something else? Why should the work not be valued by society, when clearly so many people use sex workers, and they get so much out of that? It’s also depicting the idea that sex work can be empowering.”
He adds, “There’s traditional sex work that’s mostly done by women who have been exploited or trafficked. And then there’s this more entrepreneurial, independent form of sex work that’s been enabled for everybody – for queer men and queer women alike – by online apps, where you employ yourself. It’s very much about dispelling ideas that come from a very old-fashioned way of thinking about sex work, and then what sex work actually is in 2025.” He adds, “Survival sex work is, of course, a very real thing.”
There are lingering stigmas and received notions about sex workers being victims, or that every sex worker has a trauma that’s driven them into that work. People think: why should anyone choose sex work if they have other options? I wanted to counter that
Once a wannabe journalist who interned for the New York Times in Paris, Mäkelä toyed with the idea of making a documentary about sex work early into his career. His first feature, though, ended up being 2017’s A Moment in the Reeds, a gay, Finnish drama that was partly improvised to convey “the human truth within the fiction”. Hence on Sebastian, authenticity was key: the characters are invented but the environment was fastidiously researched.
Nicholas, too, is based on real people, but his function in the story is to depict the queer loneliness that exists in London. “Max has met clients and thinks he’s in charge of the situation,” says Mäkelä. “But then he comes face to face with someone who’s lost his partner. For men like him, there might not be that context to meet new people. It’s an aspect of sex work I wanted to look at – forging connections with people who really suffer from loneliness. And it’s not just queer alienation in the film – it’s the alienation of living in a big city.”
It’s thus significant that Sebastian isn’t shy about portraying fornication, especially as the sight of two naked humans connecting is often followed by a hard cut to Max alone and forlorn at his laptop. “It’s a credit to the actors that the sex scenes seem spontaneous, because they were highly choregraphed in terms of that hand goes there at that moment,” says Mäkelä, who worked with an intimacy coordinator for the first time. “When you have the choreography mapped out, it lets the actors be free in the emotion and expressions. In sex scenes, I want the focus to be on the faces and the touching, rather than creating big tableaux.”
When Mäkelä started shooting Sebastian, he was unaware it would be released within months of Anora and the discourse around Sean Baker’s framing of sex work. The debates around who gets to tell stories about the subject matter have centred upon Anora due to its success at Cannes and the Oscars. Couldn’t they also apply to Sebastian? “It’s something the film is seeking to engage in dialogue with the audience about,” says Mäkelä. “In terms of Sean Baker, I’ve been a fan for a long time, and he’s very generously and open-mindedly engaged with the sex worker community throughout his career. I didn’t have qualms about him making Anora.” With a laugh, he notes, “I see online comments on our trailer going, ‘Oh, this is the gay Anora.’ They’re very different films.”
The more apt comparison is with Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, as hinted at by Max’s novel being titled The Miracle of Sils Maria. (In an email after our interview, Mäkelä writes that Clouds was his main influence for its “meta-reflection on making art within a commercial system” and the “unapologetic way in which it deals with industry concerns”.) Does Mäkelä have an Assayas-style genre-swap lined up? “There’s a sci-fi film I’ve always wanted to make, but it’s unlikely.” What’s harder to get financed: a sci-fi film, or a drama with gay sex? “They both have challenges.”
The director believes that Sebastian, which was supported by public funders, would have been deemed too risky by commercial bodies. At no point was he asked to tone down the raunchy sex scenes. “I always thought it had to be an authentic story about sex work,” he says. “I hope to continue making things on my own terms. Of course, we’re living in a great contraction of funding for film and TV generally, and I fear that the political changes that are happening will end up affecting the financing of queer films as well. I hope I’m wrong. That also means it’s a time not to compromise.”
Sebastian is out in UK cinemas on April 4
