Even in her 30s, Lilly Singh felt pressure to seek her parents’ permission before making a movie about sex.
It’s “the Indian girl trauma,” she jokes in a Zoom call with USA TODAY. “You’ve got to run it by your parents; you’ve got to make them proud. You want to make sure they’re OK.”
In her film “Doin’ It” (in select theaters Sept. 19), it’s sex jokes galore, with plenty of cringe-inducing scenes. The film starts with a teen version of Singh’s character, Maya, getting caught in a compromising and graphic position in front of an auditorium full of parents – and the crude gags don’t stop there. At one point, her clueless mom uses Maya’s vibrator to blend a smoothie.
As Singh, 36, recalls, “We were chasing the writers’ strike when I submitted this script,” and right before union action brought Hollywood to a halt in 2023, she’d suddenly realized “I have to tell my mom about this and ask her permission!”
‘I was like, ‘Mom, I don’t have time. We have two hours” to lock in the script, she says. “I know we’ve never had ‘the talk,’ but I need to ask your permission if I can do this movie.'”
Of course, that only led to more questions from her mother, Malwinder Kaur. A deadline-locked Singh panicked.
“I was like, ‘Ah! Ah! OK, it’s about sex. It’s a masturbation scene,” she says. “And (Mom) was like, ‘You use a vibrator?’ It was just a terrible time.”
How ‘Doin’ It’ brought Lilly Singh and her mom closer
This harried conversation led to an unexpected breakthrough for mother and daughter.
Her mother told her: “If you think it’s fine, then you should do it.”
“It’s the first time in my adult life my mom was like, ‘You get to make your own choice,’ ” Singh says. “My mom completely gave control back to me.”
The Canadian YouTube star, who became a pioneer in the digital space after starting her popular ||Superwoman|| channel in 2010, is no stranger to being in the limelight. However, other than coming out to her fans as bisexual in 2019, she has kept her personal life private.
Her online content, which began with comedy sketches and has since pivoted to video blogs and sitdowns for her “Shame Less” series, have garnered her 3.6 billion views on YouTube. Singh has also been featured in a 2016 YouTube documentary, led a short-lived late-night talk show on NBC and performed in the Disney+ miniseries “The Muppets Mayhem.”
Despite living at the top of her own media empire, which includes her Unicorn Island productions company, Singh still finds herself turning to her family; her mom even had a role in the movie as a cultural consultant. But Singh is quick to explain, “She was not there for any of the intimacy scenes.”
Lilly Singh predicts her parents’ reactions to sex scenes
In “Doin’ It,” software engineer Maya signs on for a high-school substitute teacher gig. Naturally, the only class in need of an instructor is sex ed – and Maya is lacking in that department after spending her teen and young adult years under strict supervision in India.
With the help of her childhood friend Jess (Sabrina Jalees), Maya learns about all things sex, including masturbation, which she implements into an off-book curriculum for her students.
Singh’s parents, as well as director Sara Zandieh’s parents, were all planning to see the film for the first time hours after this interview, and Singh’s nerves were back.
“Every time I watch this in a theater during my intimate scenes, I am dying inside already. So I cannot even fathom what that’s going to feel like with my mom and dad beside me,” she says.
“But I have full faith in my parents that they’re going to see the larger message.”
Lilly Singh never got ‘the talk.’ So she made a movie for her younger self.
Singh also co-wrote and produced the film, whose cast is rounded out by Stephanie Beatriz, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Mary Holland and Trevor Salter. Seven years in the making, the movie isn’t based on a true story but driven by Singh’s desire to create content from which her younger self could have benefited.
“I never got ‘the talk.’ I felt awkward around sex, the subject of sex, my whole life. And I feel like it’s important, especially when you’re addressing taboo subjects like this, for stories to look diverse and look like the world,” Singh says.
“It’s tragic that young Lilly grew up being like, ‘I never see myself in these movies. This conversation is not for me; this topic is not for me,’ ” she adds. “It’s a love letter to little Lilly, but also a love letter to all the other young girls that didn’t have that and now are grown.”
Zandieh was motivated by a similar experience, raised in the suburbs by immigrant parents from Iran and taught that romance and sex were taboo topics.
“I grew up watching Seth Rogen and Jason Bateman and Vince Vaughn and all the Judd Apatow movies, and I rarely got to see this genre from a female perspective, let alone a female lead, let alone with a cultural spin,” she says. “And (the movie) really would have spoken to my younger self.”