“You deserve to be loved and completely destroyed” is not necessarily a thing The summer she turned beautiful Fans can expect to hear star of the show Chris Breeny tell them. But in a world where celebrities can inspire parasocial relationships and fan fiction, the 27-year-old actor and other famous stars are giving voice to such fantasies.
Briney, Andrew Scott, Manny Jacinto, Tom Blyth, Jamie Campbell Bower, Victoria Pedretti, Jesse Williams, Lucien Laviscount, Thomas Doherty, and Katherine Moennig are among the actors who have powerfully lent their voices to the original audio erotica stories on the Quinn app.
Described as “made by women for the world,” Queen is designed to help listeners be a lead character in their imaginations, with stories that put female pleasure at the forefront. Now, the app has recruited Hollywood stars.
Amid the growing demand for romantic content, the collaborations offer all the titillation of a traditional bra-ripper with the added flavor of having a famous voice spin sexual scenarios right in your ear, with lines like, “I wanted her to strip me, grab me, get me naked,” “Can you open your legs for me?” and “That’s my good girl.”
Cowen founder Carolyn Spiegel
Ari Michelson/Courtesy of the topic
Queen founder Carolyn Spiegel — sister of Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel — launched the app in 2021 and began recruiting Hollywood talent last year. The first recruit was Scott, also known as the Hot Priest from Flea bag. “They’re starting to be a major marketing initiative for us,” Spiegel says. Hollywood Reporter Of strategy. “I think it was more impactful that we could have realized it.”
Audio erotica also proved influential for Spiegel, who, after feeling that nothing was “made for women with women in mind,” discovered the audio erotica scene after her personal journey with an eating disorder, her struggle with loss of libido and her struggle to feel “connected” to her body. “Visually exciting content made me feel more disconnected,” she explains. But after listening to interesting audio clips on “niche online communities” like Reddit or Tumblr, Spiegel says the difference was noticeable.
“It was rooted in storytelling and imagination, and it didn’t elicit comparison. That shift was meaningful to me, and ultimately led to the creation of Queen. If sound could do that for me, I thought many others might be looking for the same thing,” she says.
After deciding to find her own solution to the loss of interest with Quinn, Spiegel realized that pitching the idea to investors at the time was just a guessing game.
“I found that you can never judge a book by its cover in this space,” she recalls. “I would go to meetings with some investors who had a reputation for being great young investors, and they were quite cautious and put off by Quinn.” “Then, I would go talk to some of the older, more disciplined people, and they would totally understand, and vice versa. So, you can’t predict people’s relationship with sex and shame.”
Andrew Scott narrates Queen’s Guard.
Courtesy of Quinn
After raising $13.5 million from venture capital firms and launching in 2021, the app now has “hundreds of thousands of subscribers,” she said, 80% of whom are between 24 and 30 years old.
While there are many platforms and approaches to audio excitement, Quinn’s consists of entirely creator-driven content with a Spotify-like model that allows users to follow favorite creators and provide curated recommendations. The addition of collaborations with stars gave it mainstream appeal.
“It’s storytelling without a guiding visual. It’s very free. For explicit sexual content, that’s really important because everyone looks sexy,” Spiegel says. The goal of recruiting Hollywood talent was to offer a way to share vocal excitement that “sounds friendly rather than creepy.”
In each story, the actor directly addresses the listener, who is portrayed as the main character and partner of the sexual scene. Stories can vary from a sinister spy drama to a medieval romance to a passionate experience at the beach.
Quinn tends to target stars with a “large, engaged fan base.” Are app listeners at the top of their wish list for narrators, according to user feedback? Pedro Pascal, Dave Patel, Matthew Gray Gubler, and Jensen Ackles. The most successful narrators so far, says Spiegel, have been Brene, Williams, and Bauer.
With a growing list of celebrity narrators, Spiegel says getting the best talent to say yes is still an uphill battle. “About 50 percent of our playgrounds are recreational,” Spiegel adds. “But we are working to improve that every day.” “I would say people either get the message or they don’t.”
Deals can take anywhere from a week to months to close, depending on the star and their level of involvement. “They pay talent at competitive rates, and compensation varies based on the actor, the scope of the project, and the amount of time they will spend in the studio,” Spiegel says.
Performers will be offered a variety of options for scripts, written by a small in-app writing team, with contributions from a wider network of freelance screenwriters. For each original, a writer is selected who can “bring the right tone and world to life” for the project. “We find writers from everywhere — indie authors, screenwriters interested in audio, audio drama writers, and more,” Spiegel says.
Coin creators screen
“They’ll choose the script that suits them,” Spiegel says of collaborating with stars. “A lot of them become co-creators.” “I think, in general, I’ve found that screen actors really like voice-over narration — they don’t have to worry about hair and makeup, blocking, etc., and they can really focus on the story.”
The registration process lasts from eight to 12 hours. As with movies and TV, stars can work with an intimacy coordinator, who in this case focuses on “breathing support” for moaning and heavy breathing.
In one of Queen’s behind-the-scenes videos, The Gilded Age Star Blythe recalls receiving the offer: “My first thought was: ‘This is different.’ And then I read it, and I got it. “There’s something bold about telling a completely intimate story through audio.”
power (Strange things) described his novel as feeling like “fanfiction brought to life a little more.” Meanwhile, Jacinto (Freaky Friday) joked that although he was up for the challenge of taking on this kind of project, he didn’t want his parents to listen to him.
“At first, we weren’t sure if people would do it or like it,” Spiegel says. But in an AI-driven age, when the voice of a Hollywood heartthrob can be faked into any number of compromising fantasies, stars seem to relish the opportunity to take control of their own sensational production. “It’s really nice to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to do this. I’m going to do it my way with my creative vision of how I want this to be,'” Spiegel says.
“When they see other actors, at first, they want to go see what this is,” Spiegel explains of the stars of the show. “They want to see the trailers, they want to listen to the audio. They just want to see what the response has been in the past, and see what the vibe is and if this is something they would consider.”
In addition to her goal of expanding Queen’s reach thanks to outstanding voice talent, Spiegel hopes the app can “normalize” sex and desire for women. “Sex is a healthy, happy part of life that doesn’t need to be relegated to the dark corner of the internet or left on the cutting room floor,” she says. “It’s part of life, and it’s part of the best stories. The normalization of sex and desire and pleasure is not something you should be ashamed of, especially for women. It was very helpful in highlighting that message.”
Spiegel also sees a world in which erotica becomes an everyday norm, “making it one of those subscriptions that everyone has, like Netflix and Spotify.”
Queen’s collaborations with stars may help challenge some of the taboos around sexy content, but for now the stars themselves have been tight-lipped about their work with the app when approached by someone. THR.
Right now, listeners can be the main characters in their fantasies, all thanks to a pair of headphones with a famous voice perhaps leading the charge. After all, they’re there to please everyone, as Blythe says in the promotion of his story, “Play you something pretty? Your wish is my command.”
A version of this story appeared in the December 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.