Nan Goldin Makes Surprise Appearance on HBO’s ‘The Deuce’

After the news last week that she’d joined the roster of Marian Goodman Gallery, Nan Goldin made her peak-TV debut on HBO’s The Deuce.

The series, which stars Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Franco, follows the porn industry in 1970s Times Square. In this week’s episode, Goldin plays a patron at the seedy Hi-Hat Bar, owned by Franco’s Vincent Martino. Buzz and Nan at the Afterhours, New York City, a photograph from Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” series, hangs on a wall in the bar. “They call that art?” Goldin’s character says while looking at the photograph. “I could have done that.”

James Franco and Goldin in The Deuce. Photo: HBO

“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” which reflects the lives and trials of the artist’s friends and lovers living through the HIV crisis in the late ’70s and early ’80s, was shown last year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The show’s creator, David Simon, took to Twitter to explain how Goldin’s cameo came to be.

What do you have to do to get the great Nan Goldin to do a big fat meta-cameo on your television drama? You have to study her photographs of 1970s Times Square and inject the raw DNA into your film sets, your wardrobe department, your hair and makeup trailer, your story & themes. pic.twitter.com/9NLPtEmUPc

— David Simon (@AoDespair) October 1, 2018

The fictional Hi-Hat Bar is loosely based on Tin Pan Alley, a Times Square bar where Goldin actually took some of the nearly 700 snapshots that make up “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.”

Goldin will have her first exhibition with Marian Goodman Gallery in London in May. The gallery will also present a series of works by Goldin dating from 1978 to 2016 at Frieze London, which takes place October 4 to 7, and at the FIAC fair in Paris, which takes place October 18 to 21.