Actors’ reallife partners used to film ‘intimate’ scenes for soap
● Cast separated by screens to enable Eastenders to return on 7 September
Real-life partners of the EastEnders cast were drafted in to appear on screen to allow “moments of intimacy to be cheated”, a boss on the show has revealed.
Clear Perspex screens placed between actors while filming and basic computer-generated imagery (CGI) shots are also among the measures that have been used to enable the BBC One soap to return to screens on 7 September.
Executive producer Jon Sen said sets had to be adjusted, with one-way systems and temperature checks employed.
Seating in the Queen Victo - riapubw as also tweaked to allow for a two-metre distance between actors when filming resumed at the end of June.
Mr S en said :“Our greatest challenge is that we have several family units, that’ s the nature of Eastenders and soap, and families who would be in the same household, so not at two-metre distances, but obviously they are played by actors who are obeying social distancing, so there’ s a huge challenge at the heart of it.”
Perspex screens between actors on set allowed them to “bring people really close together and that’s really good because it gives an intimacy to performance that wouldn’t be possible other wise”, he said. Mr S en said: “We [also] use plate shots, which are very kind of basic CGI shots really, where you have two people ... which in the final scene you’ll see them looking like they are sitting at the same table, but actually they have been filmed in complete isolation from one another.
“S o, when you are filming, the actor will be talking to space essentially and that will happen with the other actor, and then you’ ll put them together and it will look like they are at the same table, so we’re doing that a lot.
“We hit on the idea of sup - porting artists from the same household to reflect the world outside ... or a husband and wife who would be walking down Bridge Street and of course they can get closer together than the two metres or they can be kissing in the street ... it really adds to the sense of life and, you know, we’ve actually also used reallife partners as well.
“We’ve had moments of intimacy with kind of kissing and we’ve had to choose our moments carefully, because you know it takes much more time to film like this.”
Eastenders was last on air on 16 June before filming was halted as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. New episodes will be 20 minutes or slightly longer, rather than 30, when it returns four nights a week.