‘Margo’s Got Money Troubles’ Author on How OnlyFans Influenced Margo’s Story

You know something has become culturally relevant when there are not one but two shows referencing it coming out in the same season. A double dose of OnlyFans-inspired dramas is set to premiere on Apple TV+ this spring: Tatiana Maslany‘s Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, premiering May 20, and the star-studded Margo’s Got Money Troubles, premiering on April 15. The two shows could not be more different — the former showcases the more dangerous aspects of the platform, while the latter challenges viewers to see the potential benefits, but it does prove that the controversial website is officially mainstream.

Rufi Thorpe was ahead of the curve when she wrote and published the ultra-popular 2024 novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which the TV series is based on. The story follows a single mother (Elle Fanning), who begins a career in producing adult content online in order to pay her bills as she raises her son. The author spoke with TV Insider about the journey from book to screen, how she related to Margo’s motherhood struggles, and how her OnlyFans research shaped Margo’s story.

You’ve hit on a very relatable modern problem here — life is currently very expensive, making motherhood more challenging than ever.  Was this a problem you had to deal with?

Rufi Thorpe: Yes. I got pregnant by accident when I was 26, which is really different than Margo’s 19. I was a grad student, and I did have a partner. Sam and I had only known each other for six weeks when I found out I was pregnant. We just decided to go all in, and it was an insane decision, but it turned out to be a good one for us. We’re still married and very happy 15 years later. But I had no money. Also, I was the first of my friends to have a kid. I didn’t grow up around little kids, so my baby was the first baby I ever held. I was really sort of shocked by how not set up for mothers the world is. How impossible childcare was, how long the waitlists are to get in daycare and how expensive daycare is. We sort of hit this point where daycare cost more than I was making as an adjunct. We would’ve had to pay money for me to work.

I’ve been there as well! Twice now. It certainly forces you to be creative in terms of making income. Is this what inspired you to write the novel?

Thorpe: I had wanted to write a Madonna-whore character for a while. When OnlyFans started to explode during the pandemic, I just noticed that people were talking about it in a really different way. There was less judgment, I think, because it was online and not physical, and there was less stigma against it. I just didn’t want all the moral questions to collapse into black and white before you could ask anything interesting.

I also had an understanding of how insanely difficult Margo’s situation would be from my mom, who was a single mom. My mom is really great; nothing like Shyanne. In many ways, I think the book is a love letter to single moms.

I can definitely see that! It’s hard to pay the bills even if you’re married and both have jobs. Being alone and without childcare? It’s almost impossible.

Thorpe: Right. I wound up staying home with the baby, and that was the year that I published [my debut novel] The Girls from Corona del Mar. In a way, that decision [not to work] was how I became a novelist in the first place.

How much research did you do into OnlyFans?   

Thorpe: The research was hard in part because I think I’m spoiled as a writer. A lot of people are perfectly willing to talk to you about their jobs because, for most people, no one’s interested in your job. I’ve just cold-called defense attorneys before and wound up on the phone for four hours with them. This was a lot harder. You can’t just slip into an OnlyFans girl’s DMs. I created an OnlyFans account, and I would just send a $50 tip and explain, “Hey, I’m a novelist. Here are the books I’ve written. I’m writing a book with a character who has an OnlyFans account. I really want to portray sex work as work. This book does not have a moral agenda, and I can’t write it well without doing research, and I can’t do good research unless I can get people to talk to me.”

A lot of girls can just make so much more money spending their time talking to men than talking to me, so it was a hard battle, but I did get five to seven models that were willing to go back and forth and have different conversations. They were most comfortable talking about the business side of things, talking about what the back-end of their software looked like, marketing, things like that; conversations that were more personal, even questions that I perceived as open-ended, like, “How has the way you feel about this work changed from when you first started doing it to now?” they would be like, “I don’t feel comfortable talking about that, babe.” They had really, really clear boundaries because that is what you have to do: You have to be very clear about what parts of yourself are for sale. I was yet another person trying to buy intimacy from them.

It definitely did inform my what portion of her career I chose to write about because I knew I could think my way into starting to do this work. But I think there’s a psychological and spiritual toll where you’re dealing with people’s needs and messiness; it’s exhausting. When you’re doing it for years, I think it can be really different than when you’ve been doing it for six months. That’s part of why I decided to focus on the beginning of her journey as opposed to how it feels to be doing this after three, four, or five years.

What was the strangest part about watching this come to life?  

Thorpe: There were so many strange parts. One was the casting of Rico Nasty. I am a huge Rico fan. When I was writing Margo, I had a playlist that was music that seemed like it had to do with the book. And when I would get stuck on a scene, I would go take a walk and listen to the music, and then come back and try and finish the scene. That playlist was called Hungry Ghost, and four of the 20 songs were by Rico. I didn’t even know she was up for the part! And then they cast her as one of the OnlyFans girls. So I got to meet her on set and tell her what a huge fan I was, and it felt like magic. It felt like I had somehow manifested her into the world of the book.

What do you hope viewers will take away from the show?

Thorpe: If anything, I really hope that there is a humanization of Margo. People who do sex work, they’re just people. I think that it’s one of those sort of moral lines where people tend to really “other” and demonize anyone who’s made that choice. So I hope it creates a hunger to hear more stories from people who’ve actually done this work.

I think this story also humanizes mothers! Motherhood has been getting such a bad rap. No one wants to do it anymore because everyone focuses on the negative aspects, but being a mom is also awesome. For me, personally, the good far outweighs the bad.

Thorpe: That’s been my experience as well. But I was shocked and appalled by how hard it was. How can we have built a society where the core basic thing that we need to do to keep reproducing as a species is so impossible?

Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Series Premiere, April 15, Apple TV+