Jolene Dollar is drifting off into the same mental to-do list any one of us might have at work, while a colleague is boring on about his planning permission issues: put the washing on, get the mince out of the freezer, iron some school shirts. She also has one fishnet-stockinged leg hitched up over a desk, and he is about to enter her from behind once the cameras start rolling again. A fairly average day at work, then, for Britain’s top adult performer, as she dabs at her eye with a tissue and swills her mouth out.
In Adult Material, the new four-part Channel 4 drama set in the world of porn, Jolene is one of the “last of the old-timers, for want of a better phrase”, says Hayley Squires, who plays her, chatty but thoughtful on the phone from her home in Kent. This is a first TV lead for Squires, who has been in the dramas Collateral and The Miniaturist, and numerous theatre roles, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the West End. She is still best known for her role as a desperate single mother in Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winner I, Daniel Blake, for which she was nominated for a Bafta and won most promising newcomer at the British independent film awards.
Now in her 30s, Jolene – teetering unsteadily on heels but sure of herself – is aware that her career is waning, even if, as a porn celebrity, she has a certain amount of power right now. “She was the last wave before the internet took over,” says Squires. “When we meet her, you get a sense of the anxiety of how the industry is changing: social media, how much content is free on the internet, and how exposed people are to it.”
Written by Lucy Kirkwood, last on Channel 4 with an adaptation of her play Chimerica in 2019, Adult Material was created by a predominantly female team, including the director Dawn Shadforth and the director of photography Chloe Thomson. “One of the things that Dawn said when we were making it was this is about inverting the male gaze,” says Squires. “So when you see the shots of Jolene on the [porn] set, you’re not titillated, you’re looking at the other cameras shooting her, or the people that are standing around with clipboards, or clearing up coffee.” Squires wore prosthetic breasts to get Jolene’s surgically enhanced look, “which was bloody brilliant, it took away that feeling of feeling exposed; it was like putting on a suit of armour”. An intimacy coordinator, Yarit Dor, choreographed the sex scenes.
The show is as brazen and colourful as Jolene’s pink convertible, at least to begin with, until it becomes a much darker story (although Rupert Everett, as the ponytailed porn producer Carroll, is an entertainingly sinister presence throughout). Nobody will come away thinking becoming an adult actor is a wonderful career choice; it is shown to be a sexist, racist, ageist industry where abuses of power are rife, personal boundaries corrupted and STIs an occupational hazard (the eye patch Jolene wears in the show’s trailer hides something grim). Of course, there are nuances, including a nod towards the market for “ethically-produced porn” that is, Jolene says mischievously while perched on a stool at a chicken shop, for “anyone who reads the Guardian and likes wanking”.
Squires, 32, has been working fairly steadily since leaving drama school (there were periods doing office jobs, at least until I, Daniel Blake propelled her into the public eye). She was born in south London and the family moved to Kent when she was 14. Her mum was a cook at her school canteen and her dad managed a video shop, which meant she had huge access to films growing up. She was a shy child who found her voice through drama, and she also writes; she has written plays, including one performed at the Royal Court, and spent lockdown working on a screenplay that features several generations of women, one of whom is a bareknuckle fighter. The writing side of her career “appeared out of nowhere, and now it’s a compulsion”.
Part of it was a way to create jobs for her and her friends, she says, “and hopefully, once things are up and running, to play parts I haven’t read elsewhere”. She has talked before about the lack of interesting female roles available, especially working-class ones, but says now that her motivation for writing is not really about that. “I had a time where it was quite frustrating that any sort of working-class part that came through had a very similar feel, in that sense of being helpless, powerless, they were in some kind of crisis. Actually, I think roles for women have developed massively over the last three or four years and that goes across the board, from working class upwards.”
Jolene is just one example: she may be in crisis but she is also compelling and complex. She has survived – just – in an industry in which many women don’t, and she refuses to think of herself as a victim. “There’s such a life about her. She’s noisy, even in her darkest moments,” says Squires, small-framed and huge-eyed, who portrays Jolene as a fighter, but with the dawning realisation that she doesn’t have the control or power she thinks she has. She makes her job seem, if not aspirational, then at least logical to her. “I think she does feel empowered and I think there are a lot of women who do, too,” says Squires. “I’m not talking about more extreme stuff, but they enjoy sex, they enjoy the performance of it, some of them enjoy being looked at.” Though, she adds: “I don’t know that it’s necessarily their first choice of a career.”
Squires’s character is the family breadwinner, with her eldest daughter at an expensive school; what other options are there for “a working-class woman who left school with two GCSEs”? The character even frames it, in the face of disapproval, as a feminist triumph: “I work in the only industry in the world where women get paid more than men.” (It’s an argument that requires qualification: while female performers may get paid more per scene, their careers are over long before their male counterparts’.)
Jolene has the power to turn things down; for younger performers, such as new girl Amy (played by Siena Kelly), it is presented as a choice, though not much of one. “Something [the show] looks at is just how much demand there is for ‘fresh girls’,” says Squires. “Because people can consume it so readily and have access to masses of it, they get tired of it. They want to see new faces, new bodies. After six months, you’ve done your stint, and that’s the moment where a lot of women make decisions about the more extreme porn that they’ll do. Consumerism plays a massive part in it.”
If it is slightly wearying for Squires to have to talk about the ramifications of the porn industry for women and society, it’s an inevitable consequence of taking on interesting roles, just as she is still called on to provide analysis of austerity after I, Daniel Blake. Four years on, she is pleased about the impact of that film, “but at the same time you go: ‘Isn’t it fucking terrible that we live in a country where we have to do that?’” Covid has exacerbated the situation: during the first two weeks of the lockdown, the Trussell Trust, the UK’s biggest network of food banks, reported record demand. “It has only reinforced how I feel about the way certain people are treated, and the lack of help for them. We’re probably going into some pretty disastrous times so it feels like time to reinforce the idea of taking care of each other.”
Squires shoulders these wider conversations well but, she says “my job is as a storyteller”. She laughs, at the simplicity and enormity of it: “And that’s it really.”
Adult Material begins Mon 5 Oct, 10pm, Channel 4
