Natalia Dyer Takes on Her Next Big Role in Yes, God, Yes

I’m very excited to talk to you about your new project, Yes, God, Yes, which tells the story of sexual exploration from a young woman’s point of view. Female sexuality in the context of religion has for so long been a taboo subject, but this project challenges the stigmas around it. Why is it important for audiences to see more of this narrative?Â

I think part of the reason is exactly what you said. Alice’s story is not my story, but I similarly grew up in a religious community, and if you are religious or not, I think the way that women's bodies and sexuality have been talked about or not talked about hasn't always resonated with me or with females who I talked to. I think for a long time, we had this male vision of female sexuality or what that is supposed to be. Since I was young, I kind of had the idea that a woman’s relationship with pleasure is to give it, or it’s pleasure-adjacent. I think what is really lovely about this film is it shows that pleasure is for women, and it's innate within them just like it is for men. There are so many stigmas around it, but I think screens and films are so powerful. On this deeply subconscious level, we kind of have this mirror that guides us through culture and through our lives and kind of shows us what we can and can't be or who we are supposed to be or how things are supposed to be. This is just one story, and I think it's great, and it's really close to [writer and director] Karen Maine, and she's hilarious, but I think we should have more films that show female stories from female perspectives. It’s starting to get better. You have more females in the game, but we've had this male-dominated view of what it means to be a woman and to be sensual or sexual women for so long that I think more stories like this, as many as there can be, I think is important. There's a lot of catch-up there.

In a recent interview, you talked about the parallels between your own upbringing and Alice’s. Can you touch on some of those similar experiences and how those helped inform your approach to Alice?Â

Alice is really innocent and naïve, and she's curious. I think it's that thing when you're young and you are told that this is wrong or it doesn't exist, you believe it, but you know there's also an intuition thing where that doesn’t seem to be true. I think there was a lot of curiosity as I got older, looking back at things that I've been told or read or when I was starting to form my own opinions. The thing with Alice is she finds her connection to herself at an early-ish age. I think a lot of people take longer to undo some of that thinking. I didn't grow up Catholic, specifically, but I think everyone has a right to what they believe or what they feel, and I think that's just it. It’s really questioning and making up your own mind about what you believe to be true from what you're told.

The film was written and directed by Karen Maine, who also co-wrote Obvious Child, and is semi-autobiographical. What were some of the conversations you had with Maine going into this project?

She was really open and honest and has a “taking it seriously but also seeing the humor in it” approach to her experiences. She shared a lot with me. Truly, a lot of the things that go on in the film are very close to what she actually experienced, which is wild, but I think we just really hit it off. She had this realization and then had the power to be like, Oh, this should be told. People should see this. And I was just like, yes, I want to be a part of that for sure. She has such a great perspective on things and, again, such a sense of humor about it. She’s lovely.

Alice’s exploration starts when an AOL chat turns a bit racy. AOL chat rooms were certainly a thing during my early teen years. What about for you?Â

You know, to be honest, it wasn’t before my time, but I was just never on AOL, specifically. I think my earliest memory of that kind of world was Myspace. I think that was middle school. It's funny, the old technology, like the Nokia phones and the computers with that noise of the dial-up modem—there’s so much crossover. I'm not too young to remember. That and the mystery of the internet and the innocence of it all, it doesn't quite feel that way now, you know? There's a lot more awareness of what's out there, but there's something kind of nice about the naïvety of that period.Â