Getting Kinky With ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ Star Andrew Cassese
By Zoe Wilder
I invited Andrew Cassese, an acquaintance and actor best-known for his role as Harold Wormser from the 1984 cult classic Revenge of the Nerds, over to my apartment in Brooklyn for some whiskey-drenched conversation, a tape-recorded confessional.
I was at the tail end of a five-year stint moonlighting as a professional dominatrix, incurably curious, open-minded and easy to talk to. In fact, I had just started graduate school with the intention of becoming a Sex Therapist. Cassese was interested in discussing his transformation fetish, acquiesced to an interview, and was incredibly excited to share his experiences with me.
I had never met a person with a fetish for shrinking women before. I once met a man who had a hard-on for sweaters. He’d hang from a metal cage in the crimson colored mid-town Manhattan dungeon, entangled in mohair, cashmere, cable knit and wool — an Amazing Technicolor Dreamsweater, dangling with glee while his mistress and I slugged back 40s, half-amused and half-bored on the Persian rug down below.
Standing at a statuesque 6’ 5” in stilettos, I’d participated in quite a few Amazon Woman scenarios and met my fair share of latex and leather enthusiasts, sadists, masochists, characters…
But, this was my first encounter with microphilia and I was truly delighted, as evidenced by my incessant giggling throughout the interview. You see, I’d developed my own fetish over the past few years: a fetish for people with fetishes. Few things parallel the infectious glow of a foot worshiper hungry for one more glimpse of a naughty heel or beautiful baby toe.
Microphilia isn’t your average fetish, however, as it requires sipping from a bottle marked ‘DRINK ME’ and a trip down the rabbit hole, unattainable without a willing suspension of disbelief and a magical imagination. As one of my dearest friends, kinky contemporary and Clinical Sexologist, Brittany Lacour puts it, “I don’t have access to a Tinker Bell, do you?” During a recent chat, she elaborated, “this reflects one of the most common themes in sexuality and our general culture, which is playing around with power, power demonstrated through caring / nurturing, dominance and the attraction to microphilia is really no different than a 40 year-old woman’s penchant for Fifty Shades of Grey: Power, the absence or presence of, arouses us.”
Andrew and I started out slowly, working our way through puberty, caressing the conversation with first sexual encounters, exploring pornography, divulging crushes…and then Andrew got real slick and flipped the script, pulled the ol’ switcheroo, and asked me a question or two.
Thought Catalog: Your name is Andrew Cassese, but sometimes I see you referred to as Landru.
Andrew Cassese: Landru is a nickname I picked up in high school… It’s from Star Trek. Everybody’s got the one friend who nicknames everyone, and somehow I got nicknamed by him and it just stuck.
TC: I was confused. You were trying to confuse me.
AC: Landru. I’m Landru. For the good of the body.
TC: For the good of the body, eh?
AC: That’s the shtick on the old series…
TC: Is it? Shows how much I know. I’m going to “out” you now…as Wormser!
AC: Boing oing oing oing
TC: I’m wondering, the burning question is…Do you ever use that, your role as Wormser in Revenge of the Nerds, to get into a girl’s pants?
AC: No. I don’t use it. It was not really effective in high school so I didn’t really get in the habit of it. I wouldn’t know how to use it, like it was some big deal, you know, like I’m trying to get laid and shit.
TC: I’m surprised. I’d try.
AC: Yeah, I guess. I dunno.
TC: We all have our shticks, though.
AC: I’d be like, “Hey, I’m that guy…that Wormser guy.” “Who? Who’s that? Oh yeah, I remember that guy from like 15 or 20 years ago.”
TC: What’s your shtick if you don’t use the Wormser thing?
AC: I don’t have any shtick.
TC: Oh come-on!
AC: I have no rap. I don’t. I really don’t. It’s terrible. I should have some kind of rap or something, but I just make it up as I go and I usually crash and burn pretty hard. Once and a while I get laid and life is good.
TC: Tell me about your first sexual experience?
AC: My first sexual experience? Well, what do you define as? What’s the line?
TC: What would you consider yours to be? I guess I’d say beyond French kissing.
AC: So actual touching and…
TC: Yeah, fingering or…
AC: I guess the first real experience that was of any significance was when I was doing Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise. We were doing a scene down in Ft. Lauderdale, tons of hot chicks down there. Two of the guys…I guess they called up the room like “Mrs. Cassese” because, you know, I’m staying with my mom. I’m fifteen. “Hey Andrew, come on up here. Why don’t you hang out with us for a little while?” So we’re hanging out with the stunt woman who had been doing a scene on the film that week. They were just having a little party and they took off and left us together, and we got a little busy.
TC: Oh My God, with the stunt woman!?
AC: She was fucking…She was beautiful. Big boobs, great curves, she was fucking…
TC: How much older was she?
AC: She was 9 years older, 15 years older?
TC: And you were 15 years old…
AC: Yeah, she was 24, I think.
TC: That’s hot. Although, I would have felt dirty if I were her.
AC: Yes, I’m sure she did.
TC: Do you have any fetishes?
AC: Yeah, I have a couple…
TC: Tell me.
AC: Well, I’ve told you. I guess we’ve never really spoken about it, but by proxy I tried to involve you in the whole shrinking woman fetish. I don’t know what it’s called even…microphilia?
TC: Microphilia. The opposite of gigantism.
AC: It’s the opposite of gigantism. Yes.
TC: Oh that’s wonderful! I’ve checked out some of the sites because you suggested that I do so in case I want to get involved in any of the fetish film work.
AC: Yeah, there’s crazy stuff out there.
TC: So tell me about that. Where does it come from you think?
AC: I don’t know where that came from.
TC: Hmmm…the origin. I talk to latex fetishists and they say, “When I was little I felt something rubber and it was like this indescribable experience…”
AC: Yeah, yeah…There’s always some kind of origin with that. I don’t know, though. I can’t pin down where I got it from. It’s the kind of thing where I was always fascinated by it. I’ve tried to figure out where it came from. I figure if I can pin it down and go, “Ohhhh, it’s that” then maybe I wouldn’t be into it any more. I dunno. I can’t really pin it down. It’s something that I’ve felt has always been there.
TC: One of my fetishes is meeting people with fetishes. It’s so exciting. So, we were talking about making movies involving the shrinking woman. Let’s do that! When are we gonna do this?
AC: Oh, I don’t know when we’re gonna do it. Soon, let’s do it very soon. As soon as possible. Let’s put it all together.
TC: Well, we have a video camera.
AC: Oh, really.
TC: MmmHmmm…
AC: That’s half the battle right there.
TC: It’s a little one, but it’s something to start with.
AC: Little is fine.
TC: And that brings me to an idea for a photo shoot to accompany this interview. I think it would be cool if we could take pictures in the studio of you and then separately of me and we can shrink me and maybe I could be in the palm of your hand or something. Wormser & The Incredible Shrinking Zoe.
AC: Yeah, that would be perfect.
TC: How cute would that be?
AC: Very cute. It would be adorable.
TC: A half-naked little Zoe Wilder in the palm of your hand. I love it!
AC: That would be…That would be wonderful.
TC: So, um, what kind of porn do you like to watch?
AC: I don’t really watch porn. I guess, I dunno.
TC: I don’t either. My friend is a photo editor for a porn magazine and she gets all kinds of porns in and Cassandra Cruz, that’s her right there and right there, she used to work at the dungeon with me. So I haven’t actually watched this but I got it because I know the girl.
AC: Nice.
TC: I’m curious…. I’m not much of a porn watcher. I’m more of an exhibitionist so…How deviant do you get?
AC: I don’t know how deviant is the end of the line to get.. It’s all relative. I guess. Probably not very deviant by your standards. I would think working as you have you probably have been exposed to a lot of stuff, and I’m probably not on that scale. Maybe I’m the most fucking crazy thing…
TC: No hot wax? whips? chains? spankings?
AC: No, I never got into the whole, what is it? BDSM?
TC: MmmmHmmm…
AC: S&M…I never really got into that whole thing. I was at some performance art thing at PS122 with this girl and her friend was some exhibitionist / sexabitionist-type of one woman show at this small theater space and she’s doing this crazy thing dressed in whatever, practically naked I guess, and she, in the course of the show, laid across all of us with her ass sticking right up in my face and I’m like “ahh” the only thing I could think to do was…[makes a spanking motion]
TC: Did you do it!?
AC: Yeah I did it. She was aghast. She was taken aback. It was kind of the wrong thing to do. That’s the only…Maybe I have it in me…
TC: When I first started working at the dungeon — it infects your life, in a way. I had all of these crazy dreams and I’d be walking, through the office of my day job, past a cute temp and I’d be so tempted, like I caught myself a few times going to smack him on the ass just because it became such a normal part of everything I did.
AC: You gotta remember you’re in normal company.
TC: It takes some getting used to….Smacking people around.
AC: Hey, you know. I could see getting used to that.
TC: Tell me an embarrassing sexual moment.
AC: I’ve stricken them all from my memory. You have to let me think on that. I’ll try to delve back in there and come up with something embarrassing.
TC: For the people at home we just had this half hour conversation and it was not recorded because the tape ran out so we’re recapping what you missed out on, which is Christina Aguilera is way hotter than Britney Spears.
AC: Way hotter. She’s awesome.
TC: Oh yeah, Alyssa Milano, you wanna bang her.
AC: I wanna hold her down and do stuff to her. Hold her down and bang the shit out of her.
TC: Orgies have to be organic…octopus of people, right?
AC: Something like that. You say it more poetic.
TC: And you have not tried to suck your own cock.
AC: I may have thought about it, but I’m so not limber so there’s no chance.
TC: And now that we’re caught up…What is it you think about when you’re lying in bed at night, about to masturbate, and you’ve gotten to the point where there’s a beautiful woman in front of you and she’s shrinking…Does it matter how?
AC: Yes, she must shrink slowly so that her clothes are getting bigger and bigger a la Incredible Shrinking Woman or anything like that, and that’s basically it. That’s all I need, like any element like that. There’s this radio program, I scour the web for shit and I watch porn, but I look for this kind of stuff so I guess I watch a sort of brand of porn. It’s just not…
TC: …Cassandra Cruz over there.
AC: Exactly. There’s this great radio program where this couple gets whammed, and they describe everything so great because it’s a radio show, and I guess the first thing that happens is that her rings are falling off and, you know, everything is described very intricately. So I sort of take myself through that part of the fantasy in whatever description I can come up with at the moment, whatever is the most current, but it differs from a lot of people because most people on the web that I’ve interacted with that are into this whole thing aren’t fixated on the early part of the whole thing. A lot of them don’t care. They just want her to be doll size so they can do all kinds of stuff.
TC: MmmHmmmm…
AC: And I’m not really into that. I’m kind of like even a…I’m an outcast in that whole little circle.
TC: I prefer to call it a niche.
AC: A niche. Thank you. That’s perfect. I have a niche even within that niche which is, you know, a little frustrating but what are you going to do?
TC: It’s very special.
AC: I have my thing.
TC: It’s fascinating, you know. I love that whole process of “the
shrinking.” Makes what I think about before I masturbate a little
boring now.
AC: What do you think about?
TC: One of my fantasies involves a certain musician…
AC: Does it start in a particular way?
TC: Oh, there are so many possibilities.
AC: So how long have you been with this fantasy?
TC: Oh for years! I mean, I’ll switch it up from time to time. Whatever fixation I have. Like, I’ll have a fixation on a drummer…Generally, it’s a musician. For a little while it used to be whoever was taboo. Whoever was married or taken.
AC: Why is that?
TC: It’s because I had this huge fear of commitment, essentially. So I was attracted to people who were unavailable…seizing opportunities that weren’t mine.
AC: So you wouldn’t have to be committed to them, right?
TC: MmmmHmmm…But, I got over that hump. There are plenty of single people out there and I’m not afraid of committing anymore so.
AC: That’s good. Why would you when there are so many single people out there.
TC: Exactly….Is there something we missed?
AC: I don’t really want to share my embarrassing situation.
TC: You don’t have to.