OUT Magazine Catches Up Isabella Rossellini About Sexuality, Madonna's Sex Book & More

Just when you thought you’d seen it all, Isabella Rossellini, one of the world’s most beautiful women, turns up on the Sundance Channel swimming in a construction paper sea beside two male dolphin puppets engaging in blowhole sex.

Now, the model, actress, writer, and expert on the sex lives of animals chats with OUT Magazine about unusual mating habits, her thoughts on sexuality as she’s gotten older, and what she really thinks of Madonna’s Sex book.

Here are some highlights:

Thoughts on sexuality as she gets older:
“I look at it differently now because I was born in Italy, a Catholic country, where I grew up thinking you should be a virgin at marriage. And now if somebody says, “I’m a virgin and I’m getting married,” I would be a little worried. Maybe she hasn’t had enough experience, like, oh my God, how can she even say that word? How much you can change. I was born in a country where gays were looked as something that had to be re-educated. Maybe they weren’t the most compassionate, they would look at it as a disease, and most radicals had to be thrown in jail. My cousin was gay and he was hiding it and not talking about it and by the time we were 40, I was going out with him and his gay friends. There was an enormous change in my generation. Finally, a feeling that my cousin — he died, unfortunately — that he was great and it was such a waste of time that he had suffered for so many years to keep this a secret. It’s all for the better to be more open.”

On women being objectified:
“I think if I had to choose a period in history to be born in, I would choose this one. It has been the moment when women have been able to express themselves not only as sexual object — that was a given from the beginning — but also, look at me. I’ve been a model, I became an actress, I’m a writer, I’m making my film, I’m becoming a filmmaker. I don’t know that this was allowed a few years ago, when I would have just stayed a beautiful woman. That was it and then they would say, “She used to be beautiful. Life is tough.” Now, I can evolve. I think that’s what this generation allows.”

On Madonna’s Sex book:
I don’t think the book worked, even though the photos were extraordinary and some of them quite memorable. I think there was a little bit of a moralistic sort of “I’ll teach you how to be free!” and that bothered the hell out of me. Because I think if you want to practice abstinence and that makes you happy, you are OK. If you want to be gay, that’s OK. If you want to screw anything that moves, that’s OK. It’s funny to use the word moralistic for that book because people probably don’t put those together, but it was a little bit of “I know better!” and didn’t like that.

Read the full interview by clicking here.