Sasha Grey: Your New Girlfriend

The Girlfriend Experience is many things. It's a Wikipedia entry, it's a band from Oakland, it's what brought down Eliot Spitzer, and it's a film to be directed by Steven Soderbergh. His project will be some real low-budget fare, à la is his little-seen masterpiece Bubble, which used non-actors for extra realism. In the movie, we'll see the world through the eyes of a $10,000-a-night call girl. Soderbergh just cast his lead girl, and again, she's a non-actor. Sort of.

Sasha Grey is actually an award-winning actress whose credits include Spunk’d, We Suck! POV Tag-Team Suck-Off, and Sasha Grey’s Anatomy. Her latest role will see her giving The Girlfriend Experience (that’s when they kiss you and act all lovey-dovey) to some very lucky non-actor men, while being trailed and framed by Steven’s handheld. But a lead role in an independent production isn’t as strange a fit for this particular porn star as one might think.

Grey, who keeps her own blog, appeared on The Tyra Banks Show for a segment called “The Mind of a Teenage Pornstar.” Banks bombarded and frustrated Sasha with insinuations that her a career was the result of some abusive childhood, even though Grey insisted it was a “calculated career move.” Sasha 1, Tyra 0. Grey named herself after Oscar Wilde’s famous character; she’s also an experimental electronic musician, has starred in a Roots music video, and has modeled for American Apparel and Vice. She’s also done a ton of independent film work, considers herself an existentialist, cites David Bowie and Jean-Luc Godard as her biggest influences, and just won AVN Female Performer of the Year award. Am I crazy, or is this not the coolest chick in the history of life?