'Swarm' creator Janine Nabers wanted Dre to have a 'foreign' relationship to sex because Black women are typically 'sexualized' in TV and movies

• "Swarm" co-creator Janine Nabers revealed that she wanted to make the main character Dre less sexual.
• "It was very, very important that she have a relationship with sex that was a little alien," she said.
• According to Nabers, she was very cognizant of how often Black women are sexualized onscreen.

In Amazon Prime Video's new series "Swarm," the main character Dre (played by Dominique Fishback) has a fraught relationship with sex for most of the show. Creator Janine Nabers told Insider that the decision to make Dre disinterested in sex was something she and co-creator Donald Glover talked about "a lot." 

"For me, it was very, very important that she have a relationship with sex that was a little alien and foreign," Nabers said during a recent interview at the 2023 South by Southwest film & TV festival in Austin, Texas.

"I think oftentimes, Black women on TV and in films, especially when they play the protagonist in their own life, are sexualized in some way. You know, it's like sassy and sexy and someone looking for love," Nabers continued. "And that is just not the story that I wanted to tell." 

According to Nabers, Dre's sexual activity (spoiler: the character loses her virginity in the first episode) was also inspired by tropes in horror movies and thrillers.

"Every horror story starts with the virgin, right? So how do you take that and kind of subvert that in some way? You think that this is a setup of, 'Oh, this woman's gonna lose her virginity, and then something is gonna be reborn, something's gonna unfold,'" Nabers told Insider. 

But instead, as the "Atlanta" writer explained, Dre is ultimately motivated by "blood."

"That's the way we're subverting this story. And I think we were really just careful about not really seeing [Dre] as someone who we were familiar with, in terms of her with the people that she has some sort of intimate relationship with over the course of the two-and-a-half year period," Nabers added.

Elsewhere in the interview, Nabers spoke about how a "very funny" story Glover told her about a past hook-up of his inspired a shot of a flaccid penis pressed against a glass bowl of fruit. 

"Swarm" premieres Friday on Prime Video. You can watch the trailer below.