Kyle Christy/TV One(NEW YORK) — NFL player Russell Wilson, who recently revealed he’s abstaining from sex with girlfriend Ciara, is just the latest celebrity helping to make celibacy a hot topic. Now, TVOne is out with its latest scripted series, Born Again Virgin, pushing the envelope even further. So what’s the show all about?
The series’ star Danielle Nicolet tells ABC Radio, “Born Again Virgin is a show about a girl named Jenna, played by yours truly, who kind of has everything going for her in life — she’s talented, she’s smart, she’s got amazing friends — and Jenna realizes the one thing she can’t seem to get strait is a relationship.”
“She’s maybe been a little indiscriminate in her choices with men. So she decides to have a changeover in her life,” she continues. “She quits the magazine that she works for and decides to become celibate and write about it.”
America’s Next Top Model winner Eva Marcille and Meagen Holder portray Nicolet’s onscreen besties. The Game actress also stars opposite R&B singer Tank, who plays Donovan, her hot neighbor that often tempts her to break her vow of celibacy.
In fact, in the first scene of Wednesday’s premiere episode, Jenna is dreaming about kissing Donovan. “Kissing Tank is so difficult. Yeah,” Nicolet jokes about working with Tank on set. “I feel like in each episode I just need to practice more and more and more so that I get OK with kissing Tank because as you can imagine, it’s really hard.”
Nicolet says she can relate to Jenna, especially because she was celibate before she wed her husband, Mike Kussman.
“I went through a phase, before I met my husband, where I got out of like one bad relationship after another. And much like Jenna had this realization apparently I was super attracted to jacka****, like really good looking, really, really mean kind of idiotic jacka****. And I realized that maybe I needed to sort something out with myself,” she explains.
But the actress warns that celibacy doesn’t mean her character is sexually repressed.
“She’s a very sexually liberated girl,” Nicolet clarifies to ABC Radio. “I’d like to think of Jenna as the kind of girl who has tried everything twice — like once just to do it and the second time to make sure she didn’t like it. And here she goes not having sex, but it doesn’t mean she’s de-sexualized. She still feels all the same stuff; thinks all the same stuff. She’s just trying to sort out how to relate to men without that being on the front burner all the time. And I think we all go through that as women.”
Born Again Virgin, also starring Chris Spencer, premieres on TVOne Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET/PT.
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