by James Mottram
What comes between Drive-Away Dykes and Go Beavers!? Co-Writer/Producer/Editor Tricia Cooke and Co-Writer/Producer/Director Ethan Coen discuss the second in their ‘lesbian B-movie’ trilogy, Honey Don’t!
In modern-day Hollywood, you can’t just have sequels. Everything has to be a trilogy or a franchise, a consequence of the streaming era, with binge-worthy limited series ruling the roost. But as three-parters go, Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s lesbian B-movie series probably counts as one of the more unusual in recent movie history. Last year, Drive-Away Dolls saw an all-star cast engage in a kinky comic road movie with two lesbian characters front and centre.
“We wanted to make lesbian genre movies because they don’t really exist,” explains Cooke, when FilmInk meets her and the four-time Oscar-winner Coen in Cannes. “It’s certainly underrepresented. And it just felt like, ‘Okay, here’s a way to make Queer cinema and have fun with it.’” The pair wrote Drive-Away Dolls – then called ‘Drive-Away Dykes’ – back in the early 2000s, but the script languished in development.
When it failed to find funding, Coen went back to making movies with brother Joel, whilst Cooke continued working as an editor (for the brothers, she’s cut The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Man Who Wasn’t There). More recently, Coen and Cooke decided to pull the script out of the drawer, with LGBTQ+ movies now (a little) easier to get made than back in the early 2000s. Sure enough, they decided to make a loose trilogy of lesbian-themed B-movies.
After bowing in the Midnight strand in Cannes, the second installment arrives now, in the shape of Honey Don’t!, a detective yarn that stars Margaret Qualley as Honey O’Donahue, a private eye living in Bakersfield who investigates a series of bizarre murders connected to a nearby church. Although Qualley featured prominently in Drive-Away Dolls, she’s playing a different character here, with the stories entirely unrelated. “They were never meant to be connected,” confirms Cooke.
Still, you can see similarities, from putting whip-smart lesbian gals centre stage to featuring idiotic straight white males (in this case, Charlie Day as a doofus detective) to honing in on institutional corruption. Drive-Away Dolls saw Matt Damon as a slime-ball politician. Now it’s the turn of Chris Evans as Reverend Drew Devlin, a sexually rapacious man of the cloth who doesn’t think twice about bumping people off that might get in the way of his religious cult.
While Coen had worked with Damon before (on the remake of True Grit), this was a first collaboration with Evans, who clearly relishes corrupting his wholesome image garnered from playing Captain America in so many Marvel movies. “He’s known to big audiences as Captain America, but he’s an actor. He’s done a lot of fun other things,” says Coen. True enough – just think of his turn as the unctuous playboy in Rian Johnson’s murder mystery Knives Out. “But I don’t think that he ever played the villain in a jock strap,” laughs Cooke. “That’s a first,” agrees Coen.
As for Qualley, who might usually get cast as the deadly femme fatale, she’s perfect as the brainy private dick who outsmarts all the men around her. Flipping the gender norms, she’s the female equivalent of a Humphrey Bogart-type character, with a bit of the legendary actor’s equally mighty on/off-screen partner Lauren Bacall (or ‘Betty’, to use her real name) thrown in for good measure. “We told Margaret: ‘you get to play Bogey,’” says Coen. “She was really down with that. But it really is… she’s playing Bogey and Betty.” Adds Cooke: “She’s playing Bogey in Betty’s body!”
With films like Robert Altman’s own gumshoe classic The Long Goodbye also in the back of their minds, Coen and Cooke decided to set the film away from an obvious locale like Los Angeles, in the inland California town of Bakersfield, “which is kind of a hard-scrabble, working-class place, dusty and desert-y,” says Coen. Another “touchstone” was John Huston’s 1972 boxing saga Fat City. “That was the same kind of oppressive, no way out, working-class California atmosphere. We talked about that movie quite a bit,” he adds.
The laid-back Coen doesn’t see his collaboration with co-writer/co-director Cooke (who also edits here too) as any different to his work with his brother. “Much as I always work with Joel, we go through and we just do our own set of storyboards and then refine them with a storyboard artist. That makes it easier to read – because I can’t draw,” he explains. “But also, it’s helpful to do a second draft, as it were, of the storyboards, just so you think it through twice.”
Much like Drive-Away Dolls, the same-sex sex scenes, between Honey and Aubrey Plaza’s cop, are vividly realised. The last film saw a strategically-positioned dildo stuck to an apartment wall. This time, we get to see dildos being washed after use. “When we were writing these, I was working with a writing partner who managed a sex shop in New York,” says Cooke, “and so I was around a lot of those sex toys, and they played a big role, just because I was exposed to them for the first time in a big way.”
While Cooke, 60, is married to Coen, and they share two children, she describes their relationship as non-traditional. They now both have other partners, and Cooke identifies as queer (it’s no surprise to learn the lesbian bars seen in Drive-Away Dolls came from personal experience). This time, she wanted to “normalise” lesbian sex and the toys that are sometimes used. “This is how women have sex, often, together with these toys… and you have to wash your sex toys in the morning after you have sex. So, yeah, they are meant to take the shame away.”
Expect this to continue in part three of this lesbian B-movie triptych, Go Beavers!, a film in the Deliverance and Walkabout mould, which Coen and Cooke hope to start shooting soon. But once that gets off the ground, that will be the last of them. “Our producer Bob [Graf] kept telling us, ‘You need to turn this into a series. This should be a series.’ But it wasn’t anything that we envisioned,” says Cooke. Coen nods in agreement, admitting that directing multiple episodes of a show is not in his wheelhouse. “I wouldn’t know how to do that.”
It turns out that the 67-year-old Coen is not a big lover of long-running television series in the streaming age. The Sopranos, Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul? “I never saw any of them!” he says, before Cooke reminds him that they did watch The Diplomat, the Netflix political drama starring Keri Russell, and the Kate Winslet-starring Mare of Easttown. “I really enjoyed that,” he admits.
One thing he does promise is that he and brother Joel will work together again. That could be a while yet, with Joel set to shoot Jack of Spades in Glasgow with Josh O’Connor next month. But the sibling filmmakers, who last collaborated on 2018’s anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, are not done. They wrote a new script just over a year ago, and still have a couple of others lurking around. “We’ll do something at some point,” he says. But you can bet it won’t be anything like Honey Don’t!
Honey Don’t! in cinemas 28 August 2025
