HBO Max Orders Swedish Comedy ‘Lust’ Starring ‘The Bridge’ Actress Sofia Helin

HBO Max has greenlighted the Swedish original comedy Lust, starring The Bridge actress Sofia Helin and produced by Fremantle-backed Miso Film. It comes ahead of HBO Max’s launch in the Scandinavian country later this year.

Co-starring Anja Lundqvist, Julia Dufvenius and Elin Klinga, the eight-part series is billed as an outrageous and painfully honest comedy about four middle-aged women in Stockholm struggling to keep their libidos alive in a sexually frustrating world.

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Anette (Helin), Nadia (Lundqvist), Ellen (Dufvenius) and Martina (Klinga) have all been friends since school. When they find out that Anette is conducting a government survey dubiously dubbed “Make Sweden Sexy Again,” they are intrigued. Is good sex — or the lack thereof — impacting the health of Swedish women over 40?

Lust is written by Frans Milisic Wiklund, based on an idea and in close collaboration with Åsa Kalmér, Dufvenius, Helin and Lundqvist. Ella Lemhagen directs, while the producers are Sandra Harms and Karl Fredrik Ulfung. Executive producers for HBO Max are Christian Wikander and Camilla Curtis.

Helin said: “In my childhood home, there was a book on the bookshelf that was completely torn apart by all the girls and women of the family; the sex survey ‘The Hite Report,’ the 1976 bestseller by American feminist Shere Hite. Getting an insight into the adults’ most intimate rooms and understanding how different everyone is when it comes to sex was astounding.

“When me and my friends as adults mentioned that we actually talk to each other about everything but our sex lives, we recalled Shere Hite’s groundbreaking sex survey. It turned into long conversations with a lot of laughter. It is such a vulnerable subject and therefore so liberating to be able to laugh together. Pairing a sex study with a comedy series created a fantastic creative space and it became our series: Lust.”

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