Casual Sex? is the first studio feature film to acknowledge the fear of AIDS that was sweeping America in the late 1980s.
Victoria Jackson explained why she took the role of an an awkward, shy type with little sexual experience in a 1988 interview. ''My manager read the script and gave it to me,'' Jackson said, ''and I read it and said, `I have to be Melissa.` Whenever you see sex in a movie, it`s always glamorized, and this was so real. She (the character) is insecure, and I related to that; I was a late developer. I was raised a Baptist, and I believe in the Bible, and I didn`t go through the `70s sleeping around. But no matter who or what you are, you`re going to have sex, and, initially, it`s going to be awkward.''
Lea Thompson said they kept rewriting the script and changing the direction of the film, and she was not happy with the revised ending. "It was a completely different movie from the movie we shot. They tested it and that was really difficult for me because Andrew Dice Clay was in the movie, and he had this image," Thompson said in an interview. "He was the buffoon in the first version of Casual Sex? and he ended up scoring so well, they ended up making me marry him. I was like, how did it go from buffoon to marrying him?" Thompson didn't even want to kiss Dice. "I liked him, but you know, I didn't feel like kissing him," she said. "The things he says were so offensive to me as a feminist, I just thought it was really weird."
In a 1988 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Victoria Jackson was asked if it was hypocritical for a fundamentalist Christian like herself to appear naked in the film. She said she didn`t think it was any big deal. "Christians have sex, and they love sex,'' said Jackson. "It's just that they don`t make fun of it. It's a beautiful thing." Then she added, "The fact is, the film is very subtly pro-monogamy, anti-casual sex.''
According to 'Time Out', the film's source production was "originally a three-song sketch by Wendy Goldman and Judy Toll', it was then worked up into a play, and finally a screenplay, reflecting the new AIDS consciousness".