Two Girls, One Pill: Kuhoo Verma Stars In Raunchy Road Movie Plan B

By Deepa Lakshmin


Two ladies, one pill — that’s the magic formula for Hulu’s Plan B, director Natalie Morales’s raunchy comedy starring Kuhoo Verma and Victoria Moroles. The premise is simple however sharp: two best companions, united in their clever banter and lack of high-school popularity, embark on a road trip across South Dakota right after Sunny (Verma) has sex for the opening time at the only party she’s ever thrown. There’s a hiccup with the condom, and soon she’s racing to find emergency contraception in a town where “conscience clause" legislation permits pharmacists to deny medication if it goes against their beliefs. With the clock ticking, Sunny and Lupe (Moroles) set out for the nearest Proposed Parenthood; their journey, just like the party the night before, does not go as expected.


Verma, a talented singer and off-Broadway performer, got her film break in 2017’s Oscar-nominated rom-com The Big Sick, where she played one of several potential brides with whom Kumail Nanjiani’s family member sets him up. “I think a lot of the previous roles that I had done were characters that were coming from a place of shame and coming from a place of deep self-deprecation and self-misunderstanding and not really standing their ground in what they believe in and what they think,” Verma told MTV News. With Sunny, it was “refreshing” that “the way she sees herself is with excellent respect and ownership. She is aware what she wants.”


Plan B’s most gut-wrenching catharsis takes place in a Proposed Parenthood parking lot hours away in Rapid City, South Dakota. It’s Sunny’s last shot at getting the pill she needs to live the life that she wants at her age. Her future feels out of her control. “It was tremendously healing for me,” she mentioned about filming the emotional scene, which she says helped her “have this universal relief as a woman of color and just cry about the agitation the sort of obstacles we have to go through in this country.”


“It’s like that moment I think a lot of people of color have in their lives, where you don’t really have language all of the time to reckon with why you feel different,” she continued. “Suddenly, everything sort of spills over. I hope people can watch it and feel a sense of familiarity and also a sense of ‘Oh, I’m not the only one that’s going through this, and I’m not the only one that’s having a hard time in this body.’”


Plan B doesn’t gloss over the impacts of racism and sexism; you visualize how some of Sunny’s classmates stereotype her based on the color of her skin, and why sex is connected to male pleasure nevertheless not female pleasure. Nevertheless the film comes at these issues through Sunny’s eyes. “She, as a person, doesn’t know much about [reproductive rights],” Verma mentioned, “which is why she enters every situation with the ideal intentions and the perfect hope in mind and is really surprised and shocked by like, wait, what do you mean I don’t have access to things that I really need?”


Plan B may be a movie, however Sunny’s experience is all also real for several females across the nation. In Texas, a “heartbeat bill” recently signed by Governor Greg Abbott can ban abortion six weeks in, any time some females might not even realize they’re pregnant. Similar laws exist in Oklahoma, Idaho, and South Carolina. As for emergency contraception like the Plan B pill, nine states have some group kind of restrictions in place, from excluding it from insurance plans to allowing pharmacists to turn away customers.


to make for the role, Verma returned to her childhood residence in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, and cracked open the journals she filled in middle school and high school. She wanted to “[go] back to that mindset of being a misunderstood Indian girl,” because that’s Sunny — and multiple other teenagers. It’s a mentality you could grow out of after awhile, although it’s tough to forget that ache. “Do you remember what this looked like, to be this desperate for sexual attention and not really knowing how to navigate that? And feeling like each person else is seeing you as this nerd, so you yourself are like, I don’t visualize myself that way, I think I’m a cool bitch,” Verma mentioned. “A lot of that was really resonating with me because I was simply like, oh wow, I have to do this for the middle-school version of myself. I have to do it for the younger Indian females who don’t know how to navigate their sexualities.”


Plan B is far from the initial coming-of-age tale about going on an adventure with your best friend, although even compared to 2020’s Unpregnant and Never Rarely Some days Habitually — which identically tackle reproductive justice — Plan B holds its ground with wild and foul-mouthed scenes that leave the audience guessing what just happened. Sunny and Lupe are pushed for now outdoor their comfort zones @they could as well be on another planet. “[The raunchiness is] something that I think we don't get a possibility to showcase as people that are not cis white men,” she mentioned. “These are two common gals who are in the crassest situations ever.”


Although the plot and dialogue aren’t obscene for the sake of obscenity. The absurd characters and interactions make you laugh, yet they also make you think. From a hilariously awful abstinence-only sex-ed class to a refreshingly sincere conversation with a crush, Plan B untangles sexuality from shame. Sex “shouldn’t carry any guilt or moral value to it,” Verma mentioned. You watch Sunny and Lupe learn this lesson.


“In my [sex ed] classes... Everything was directed to the men as like, ‘I know that you’re uncontrollable, nevertheless these are some things you have to know before you go on your rampage of sex,’” Verma mentioned, reflecting on her own high-school experience. “In Plan B, it was very much anti-girl and anti-woman rather than pro-man, however I feel like in my health classes it was very pro-jock, pro-boy, which fully also disvalues LGBTQ+ issues and is totally ignoring probably more than 50 percent of the class’s needs.”


There’s no one to teach Sunny and Lupe how to be their most authentic selves, so they do their best to figure it out on their own, all while leaning on each other for support. It’s probably no surprise they hide their morning-after road trip from their parents. Sunny can’t fathom telling her mom, who’s rarely made space for mistakes in their house. “How revolutionary would it be if parents were to come from a place of concern for their [kids’] safety first and foremost before shaming them for a different moral standing?” Verma said.


“I have continually seen that stereotype of Indian parents and Indian elders being strict and backward and suffocating. Over the course of the movie, we realize that’s actually really not what Sunny’s mom is,” she continued. There comes a point where Sunny is pleasantly surprised by the types of conversations her mom is open to having; honesty supports the move their relationship forward.


At first glance, this might not seem like a movie you’d aspire to watch with your parents, however all vulgarities aside, the family member ties are just as crucial as Sunny and Lupe’s unconditional friendship. Lupe also carries her own secret, and in the event you peel back the movie’s layers of sex talk, the clear message is about learning to be yourself, shamelessly. There just happens to be some genitalia involved. “I did show photos to my mom to prep her,” Verma revealed about telling her own mom about an outrageous scene connected with an outside blowjob and one precariously placed piercing.


“I was like, ‘You will be seeing this. Are you OK with that?’ I thought she could be really disgusted, and she just began laughing out loud. It was the opening of several moments where I was like, ‘Oh, duh, my mom is a person who thinks penises are funny just like I do. Nice.’”