Keeping sex scenes safe for stars
In the wake of the MeToo movement, the major TV networks are hiring ‘intimacy coordinators’ to ensure actors don’t feel exploited. Alice Vincent reports
For decades, sex on screen has thrilled, fascinated and caused complete outrage — but rarely has it been demystified. It took Donald Sutherland 45 years to pour cold water on the rumour that he and Julie Christie weren’t really acting during Don’t Look Now’s famous fornication. The tragically premature death of Brittany Murphy, meanwhile, has kept the school-yard whispers that she and Eminem didn’t fake it in 8 Mile firmly in the pop culture playground.
Now, in the wake of the MeToo movement, there are fears that such scenes might be causing actors, or more often actresses, emotional and psychological harm. Cue the rise of ‘intimacy coordinators’ — professionals whose job it is to monitor sex scenes and ensure they are filmed with the utmost respect for the feelings of those in front of the camera.
In October, HBO, the US network responsible for such nudity-laden shows as Game Of Thrones and Westworld, made headlines when it announced it was hiring intimacy coordinators to monitor the filming of sex scenes across all of its programmes.
For those in entertainment who have been pushing for better codes of conduct around intimate performance, it was a watershed moment.
“We’ve felt like we were yelling into the void for many years,” explains Claire Warden, an intimacy director based with Intimacy Directors International in New York. “Finally, the industry is listening to what we’ve been saying for decades.”
“Before Weinstein happened, acknowledging the emotional and psychological injuries that could be inflicted on set just didn’t happen,” says Ita O’Brien, an intimacy coordinator who is responsible for the many provocative scenes in a new Netflix comedy drama, Sex Education. “Now people want to change that.
“In many situations you’re pretty much just left to get on with it. You’ll get to the sex scene and be told, ‘Now you two just work it out for yourselves’ or, ‘Just go for it’.”
For Fatal Attraction, Michael Douglas and Glenn Close were plied with champagne and margaritas and left to crack on with it. In 2014, Jean-Marc Vallée, the director of Wild, told The New
York Times: “It wasn’t specifically planned for this guy to take Reese [Witherspoon], to turn her on her back, and [simulate sex] from behind, but it just happened as we were shooting.”
Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando notoriously came up with the butter stunt for Last Tango In Paris at breakfast — an idea that left the unprepared Maria Schneider feeling like she had been “a little raped”.
Intimacy coordinators set out to better prepare everybody involved — from the costume designers to the cast — for what is about to happen and help choreograph the sex scene to the satisfaction of actor and director alike.
O’Brien, who grew up in the UK but whose parents are from Tyrone and Tipperary, compares it to a waltz where, instead of steps and turns, “you might have someone saying, ‘I’ll get on top of you, I’ll stare into your eyes, I’ll put my hand around your neck, I’ll gaze into your eyes once more and then we kiss’.”
It was Warden’s colleague, Alicia Rodis, who was the first intimacy coordinator to be brought on by HBO for The Deuce, a drama about Manhattan’s sex trade in the 70s. There, her changes ranged from the small and practical, such as supplying actors with covering underwear or pads to kneel on, to the more profound — namely making actors feel they had power over their own bodies.
Just this week, Desperate Housewives actor Neal McDonough was in the news after revealing he had lost six-figure jobs for refusing to kiss other actresses. Both Warden and O’Brien discuss the importance of establishing where an actor’s boundaries lie.
“There’s a real taboo on the word ‘No’ in this industry. If an actor says it, they’re being difficult, or a diva, or not dedicated enough,” says Warden.
“We’re saying, ‘Where’s your no? Where’s your yes?’,” explains O’Brien. “Then we positively can work with the ‘yes’. It means both actors know that their bodies are being respected and they don’t need to worry about touching their partners somewhere they’d be uncomfortable with, because everything’s been discussed.”
O’Brien was responsible for overseeing the many vigorous sex scenes in Sex Education, a new teen drama on Netflix. The show, which follows the repressed son of a sex therapist (Gillian Anderson) as he doles out advice to his anxiety-addled, promiscuous classmates. It makes Skins, the edgy teen drama that ran on Channel 4 for several years, look tame. There is much full-frontal nudity from a cast barely into their 20s.
“Because it was a young cast, everybody knew they had to take good care,” says O’Brien. Boundaries were drawn, scenes were well rehearsed and, when it came to filming, it was done on a closed set — meaning just the director, the director of photography and the focus puller (responsible for maintaining image sharpness) were present.
Such control can prove controversial. As director Judd Apatow has said: “If it’s overly rehearsed or overly thought through, it seems like bad soft-core porn.”
Warden says she’s “come up against that a lot” and argues that a well-directed sex scene requires proper acting just like any other.
“People think that we’re dumbing down or sanitising stories of sex,” she says.
“Any actor who says [scenes shouldn’t be overly rehearsed] wouldn’t like someone to improvise violence on them. There’s a difference between real and authentic. ‘Real’ is an actor who has just met her co-star and is really scared. That’s not the story in the romcom you want to tell.”
O’Brien says “there’s a long way to go”, but insists that when it’s not all left to chance, “it creates a way better sex scene”.
Because it was a young cast, everybody knew they had to take good care