Charlie Murphy doesn’t usually watch herself on screen. She didn’t watch Happy Valley, in which she played victim-turned-copper Ann Gallagher. Nor did she see Peaky Blinders, in which she played real-life trade union activist Jessie Eden for two seasons. But Netflix’s new erotic thriller Obsession was different: “I’m really happy I watched it,” the Irish actor tells me over Zoom. “The main reason was to see...” She pauses for a split second to think of the word she means, before concluding: “To see the process play out.” I’m sorry, I tell her, I really thought you were going to say “the sex scenes” then. She throws her head back and howls. “I watched it to see... the tits. Were they OK? Yes, OK, they’re fine.”
It’s true: breasts are on show in Obsession, the new Netflix four-parter that’s being touted as the horniest series on the platform. It is part psychological frog boiling, part BDSM thriller. Based on Josephine Hart’s 1991 novel Damage, it tells the story of a well-to-do doctor turned politician, William, who allows himself to become embroiled in a steamy affair with his son’s fiancee, the mysterious and alluring Anna. Quickly, he becomes completely obsessed with her. The sex scenes have been heavily trailed on social media and in the official trailer, all sultry lighting and shots ranging from the suggestive (a thumb being run up a neck, wrists being bound in ribbon) to the downright demonstrative (knickers landing over a pair of heels and Murphy being slammed against a wall by co-star Richard Armitage). It’s “the return of the erotic thriller”, claims one headline.
