Proving to be a faithful adaption of Neil Gaiman's book, American Gods, in its three episodes, is doing its best to bring the book to life in an authentic way. This was proven when the makers brought the book's most crazy scene on screen.
Titled Head Full of Snow, the 10-minute sequence that led to some hot sex begins between the Muslim immigrant, Salim, and taxi driver Jinn, and raged fire on TV screens. The scene served as a perfect book-to-TV adaptation for those who have read the chapter. While it summed up how crazy things could get on the show, co-creators Bryan Fuller and Michael Green revealed the way the whole erotic scene panned out.
Talking to CinemaBlend, the duo revealed that the sexual intercourse was treated as a form of worship. "We just started talking about what it was like to experience sex as a form of worship, and also how do you cinematically convey an orgasm with the tools that we had. So we talked about, in the book, it sort of loosely describes the rapture of their sex, and then a blowjob is really the most specific detail, and we thought about what it is, and what a blowjob means. We thought for Salim, that's probably the extent of his sexual vocabulary, and so shouldn't the Jinn show him how to make love to another man? Thankfully we had a visual effects team that was able to pull off the crazy images of orgasm," the duo said.
For those who haven't seen the episode yet, here's a quick recap of the scene: It begins with Salim, who moved from Oman to New York with the aim of pursuing a new life. He seen returning from a day of unsuccessful job hunting. He decides to board a taxi to his hotel. The taxi is driven by Mousa Kraish, later revealed as Jinn aka Ifrit, a mythical person born from fire.
The scene builds up from watching them have an emotional connection to a sexual connection as Salim invite Jinn and the sex scene pans out. But why was this scene so important to Salim's character?
Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, Fuller explained, "It was very important to us to look at Salim's story as a gay man from the Middle East whose sexual experience was probably relegated to back alley blowjobs and didn't have an intimate personal sexual experience."
He goes on to share, "In the book, Salim blows the Jinn in the hotel, and then he's gone. It was important for us in this depiction to have Salim drop to his knees and prepare to achieve sex the way he'd been accustomed to, and the Jinn lifts him off of his knees and kisses him and treats him much more soulfully and spiritually to change his perception of who he is and what his sexual identity has become. That felt like it was empowering in a different way, showing a protagonist as the one who is being penetrated."
"What we wanted to achieve there is for an audience who might not necessarily be accustomed to seeing two men having sex, to recognize it as a beautiful thing," the writer adds.
If you haven't watched the third episode, it is available on Starz official website and Amazon Prime. You could click here and watch episode 3 online.
