After its upcoming premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Netflix’s Marilyn Monroe biopic, Blonde, will join the likes of Showgirls and Blue Is the Warmest Color as one of the rare major films rated NC-17 (not suitable for audiences under age 18). Although star Ana de Armas isn’t totally on board with the distinction.

“I didn’t understand why that happened,” she said when asked about the rating by French fashion magazine L’Officiel. “I can tell you a number of shows or movies that are way more explicit with a lot more sexual content than Blonde. But to tell this story, it is important to show all these moments in Marilyn’s life that made her end up the way that she did. It needed to be explained. Everyone [in the cast] knew we had to go to uncomfortable places. I wasn’t the only one.”

She isn’t the only one confused by the controversial rating, either. Filmmaker Andrew Dominik, who adapted Blonde from Joyce Carol Oates’s best-selling 2000 novel of the same name, told Vulture in May that he hadn’t anticipated receiving such a rating. “I was surprised. Yeah. I thought we’d colored inside the lines,” Dominik said. Still, he maintained that “Americans are really strange when it comes to sexual behavior, don’t you think? I don’t know why. They make more porn than anyone else in the world.”

Dominik took a slightly harsher tone when speaking to Screen Daily about the film’s sexual content in February. “It’s a demanding movie. If the audience doesn’t like it, that’s the fucking audience’s problem,” he declared. “It’s not running for public office. It’s an NC-17 movie about Marilyn Monroe. It’s kind of what you want, right? I want to go and see the NC-17 version of the Marilyn Monroe story.”

In the upcoming film, which, according to Netflix, “blurs the lines of fact and fiction to explore the widening split between [Monroe’s] public and private selves,” de Armas stars as the titular sex symbol alongside Bobby Cannavale, Adrien Brody, Julianne Nicholson, Xavier Samuel, and Evan Williams.

Blonde—and all of its pearl-clutching content—is headed to Netflix on September 28.