I advertised myself as a ‘rental friend’. Then a man booked me to lick his toes

Say you’re at a wedding. You’re sitting next to someone you haven’t seen for years – let’s call her Maggie. You haven’t spoken for ages and, truth be told, you were never that close. You haven’t seen her since she disappeared off to the City and made loads of money.

Maggie introduces you to her companion. He’s attractive, though no Hollywood hunk. But he’s magnetic company. Charming, articulate, he keeps the table entertained with his stories. Frankly, you’re a bit jealous: your partner can be such a bore at these things. The only oddity is that the man seems a little vague about how he met Maggie.

You go home, do some googling – and stumble upon Maggie’s new man. Turns out he’s available for hire by the hour: dates, weddings, work dos. Any time you need a steadying presence at your side. It’s all strictly non-sexual, definitely not an escort service. You’re appalled… and then a bit curious. You’ve got that office party coming up and your colleagues have never met your other half. You pause, then click on the link. After all, what’s the harm?

Welcome to the world of rental people. For a spell, Davy Rothbart, a Los Angeles-based independent writer and film-maker, hired himself out as a companion – a non-sexual escort – to smooth over the bumps of freelance life and find a story.

“The experience was really intense, really interesting,” he said. “You’re getting a window into this loneliness – I frame it as American loneliness, but it’s essentially human loneliness. These people are wealthy, and wealth can buy you material things, but it can’t buy you company, or love, or someone to dote on you. And through a service like this, you can buy that.”

Rothbart signed up with an agency called Rent a Gent and got a handful of bookings. “If you get invited to a cousin’s wedding or something, it’s sad to show up on your own,” he said. “And these [women’s] lives were filled up with work stuff – they didn’t have time for a romance. It’s also cleaner: they can get all the attention they would want at an event like this, they have someone to synthesise the experience with, but at the end of the evening they can disengage.”

It didn’t always work out that way. While his partner approved of his moonlighting, though “she told me not to have too much fun”, Rothbart sometimes couldn’t leave his clients’ lives behind. “A couple of times, I’d drop someone off at the end of a night at some beautiful mansion and I’d be like, ‘Have a great weekend!’ And I’d be going home to my awesome girlfriend, and we’d hang out with our friends at the beach, and you realise: this person isn’t necessarily going to speak to someone before Monday morning… It really pierces you.”

He came to find the work dehumanising – for himself and his clients. “The subterfuge is fun in the first few minutes. It’s like you’re putting on a play for just two people. But it becomes corrosive – I was worried I’d be found out and humiliate the woman. It was exhausting keeping the story straight. And the additional sad note was I’d never see these people again. I couldn’t extend my relationship with any of them.”

The idea of renting other human beings isn’t new. The emperor Nero is said to have ordered 5,000 of his citizens to show up to his poetry readings and applaud enthusiastically. In 1800s Paris, agencies hired out “claques” to theatres and opera houses. These roving clusters of audience members would be used to fill seats, laugh uproariously, cry loudly or simply yell “Encore! Encore!” at the end of the show.

But the idea of renting a single other person for non-sexual reasons really took off in Japan. In 1991, the entrepreneur Satsuki Oiwa started the Japan Efficiency Corporation. Its remit was to train corporate employees, but after a few years Oiwa started offering clients professional actors to provide “soft service – reaching others with a sympathetic heart”. The practice took off and, by 2009, 10 family rental services were operating in Japan, including Family Romance, which became the biggest player in the market. The practice spread to other countries, including South Korea and China, where wedding guests, fake foreign business connections and “oppas” – a South Korean term for an attractive older male companion – could be hired. In China, the phenomenon was called “white-guy window-dressing”.

A new film, Rental Family, runs with this notion. It stars Brendan Fraser as an out-of-work American actor who is hired by various lonely clients to accompany them to events and as they go about their days. But the film’s larky, aren’t-things-kooky-in-Japan approach glosses over a more complex – and troubling – reality.

Shoji Morimoto has worked as a “rental person” for seven and a half years. He has an impressive social media following and in 2023 released a memoir, Rental Person Who Does Nothing. For Morimoto, who advertises online, being hired out by the hour was a conscious step outside Japan’s relentless culture of hustle.

“From childhood through my corporate days, people around me often said, ‘You never do anything’,” he recalls. “So I resigned myself to thinking: ‘Doing nothing is what suits me.’ That’s when the idea for this job came to me. When I’m working, I feel at peace.”

He charges clients up to 30,000 yen (£140) for his services. His remit is broad, the only caveats that interactions are non-sexual and unromantic. He has picnicked under cherry blossoms, shared a takeaway pizza with a woman recovering from a broken heart and helped someone collect laundry that had fallen onto an intimidating neighbour’s balcony.

“The most unusual request was: ‘I want you to remember me, out of the blue, tomorrow’,” he said. “The client, who was facing a meeting where they were sure to be met with nothing but hostility, told me: ‘If just one person in the world could remember me without malice tomorrow, I feel like I could get through it.’”

I tried for weeks to see if similar services existed in the UK. There are certainly several non-sexual escort websites but I struggled to speak to the people behind them or those advertising on them. (Plenty were happy to talk but ‘at the usual rate’; I wasn’t convinced my editor would think it an ethical use of budget.)

At last, I got through to Oli Delgaram-Nejad, who had a profile on one of the most popular services, British-based Dukes of Daisy, which was set up in 2013 by Daisy Lain after she had positive experiences with other rent-a-friend services and was made redundant from her corporate job. “[Dukes of Daisy] was created specifically to offer a safe, transparent alternative to escort-style platforms, with clear boundaries and active moderation,” she told me.

Delgaram-Nejad also had profiles on other websites, including another “platonic escort service”, Gentlemen 4 Hire.

“I’d spent the last 10 years doing academic research in an isolated, rural location and I’d just got out of a decade-long relationship,” he said over the phone (for free). “The dating apps were exhausting and I was looking to make friends. The plan was to advertise myself as a plus-one for weddings, hanging out with people, going to the cinema or getting coffee. Then the requests started coming in… and they were batshit.”

Via Gentlemen 4 Hire, one man asked Delgaram-Nejad to drive up to Manchester and have sex with his wife. “Then he asked: ‘Could you just nibble my penis?’ He said we could meet first – and then I realised there was no wife and he was trying to trick me into having some bi-curious experience.”

Another caller told him that he would hire a hotel room for them. He wanted Delgaram-Nejad to sit opposite him, shoeless and reading. “He said: ‘I want you to ignore me while I stare at your feet, and occasionally insult me. Tell me to make you a coffee. Or call me a little bitch. Tell me I’m a faggot.’ To this day, he sends me photos of socks on Amazon.”

Delgaram-Nejad was shaken by his brief experience as a “rental friend”. A thoughtful man who has published books about anxiety and produces a podcast about mental health, he believed in the initial promise of the industry. He added: “Japan has loads of lovely, wholesome practices, but I’ve found that if you’re looking to get into the rent-a-friend industry in the UK, there’s zero chance you’ll have the experience represented by Brendan Fraser in the movie. It’s so seedy.

“I was told there was a market out there for people who’ll pay just to hang out. But that’s not what’s going on – what’s going on is: ‘Can I lick your toes in a hotel room?’” Gentlemen 4 Hire did not respond to a request for comment.

Like Rothbart, he is convinced the rental-friend industry – at least outside Japan – is driven by loneliness and economic precariousness. It exploits both clients and rental people; Delgaram-Nejad paid up to £40 a month to have his profiles hosted online.

“The client base is desperately lonely, and so are the guys drawn into advertising on these sites,” he said. “There’s this notion that if you pay a bit of money your pain will go away. These sites are farming that need.”

He was also appalled by the lack of due diligence. “There was no ID check, no DBS [Disclosure and Barring Service check]. I paid my money and my profile was live in 30 seconds. I’m a 5ft 11in, 100kg guy. I can handle myself. But if I was a woman, walking into a strange hotel room… I may die that night. It’s a completely different experience.”

Lain, from Dukes of Daisy, said: “While we do not currently run DBS checks as a blanket requirement, any disclosure or discovery of serious criminal history, particularly relating to sexual offences, results in immediate removal.” She also noted that any “verified” profiles on the site require an ID and age check. It is nonetheless possible to have a publicly available profile without being verified.

One of Delgaram-Nejad’s saddest requests came from a 19-year-old girl who said she wanted to lose her virginity to an older man. “She told me she’d met another guy six months ago for the same reason,” he recalled. “He took her to the hotel room and demanded more money. They went to a cash point then drove somewhere she didn’t know. So she got out of the car and ran off… This whole world is so fucked.”

On its website, Dukes of Daisy claims to have served more than 46,000 people around the world. It advertises itself as “a safe way to rent a friend” and its tagline is: “Everyone deserves good company.” While that is undoubtedly true, perhaps it’s naive to think such services can be purchased guilt-free. After all, is it ever harmless when you buy another person, by the hour, no strings attached?

After he went cold turkey on the sites, Delgaram-Nejad resolved to make friends the old-fashioned way. He’s started a chaplaincy course, reached out to connections on social media and got in touch with a couple of old mates from his A-level days via Facebook.

“I messaged everyone I’d neglected for 10 years,” he said. “We might go bowling next weekend. Or grab a roast.” And he’ll be paying.

Rental Family is in cinemas on 16 Jan

Photographs by Karen Robinson for The Observer, James Lisle/Searchlight Pictures, Dan Busta, Chika Takumi