We always say: ‘Your no is a gift. Let us know your boundaries’”
– Ita O’Brien
production, which she does not name, that she says was “really challenging … full-on simulated sex scenes, the actor saying, ‘Help, I’ve never done this before’ – but the director refusing to let me choreograph.”
From her perspective, sex scenes – or body dances, as she calls them – require hard work and training. O’Brien and her network of committed coordinators around the world are there to provide that. The best intimacy coordinator, she explains, is a go-between, who can facilitate both the vision of the director and the needs of the performers. “A lot of our work is done in meetings with the director, writers and actors, having conversations around the project’s artistic vision – and the consent needs of the performers – and getting everybody on the same page about what is and isn’t acceptable. We always say: ‘Your no is a gift. Let us know your boundaries.’”
O’Brien recently expanded her training program, Intimacy on Set, to Australia and New Zealand. Her timing was impeccable: with Australian film crews overwhelmed by pandemic productions, her team has never been busier. At the moment, there are only three fully qualified intimacy coordinators in Australia (two of whom trained with O’Brien), but she is training 14 more, both here and in New Zealand.
Her meticulous approach is proving successful. Chloë Dallimore, an O’Brien mentee, was recently hired as the first intimacy coordinator on Home and Away. Dallimore was also the intimacy coordinator on
Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton’s Three Thousand Years of Longing and
Carmen, starring Paul Mescal
(Normal People), both of which recently filmed in New South Wales.
As a trained dancer and former president of Equity, the union body for actors, Dallimore knows the importance of choreographing the “body dance” of a sex scene. “You wouldn’t give two actors a knife each and say, ‘so you guys have to have a fight now, and one of you needs to stab the other one. Just go for it,’” Dallimore says.
“In a sex scene, would you say to two actors: ‘I need you to have sex. Just go for it’? There’s going to be danger. There’s going to be physical and psychological impact.”
The problem, she says, is that not everyone has been in a fight – but most people have had sex. “There’s this weird idea that because adults have sex, they somehow know how to act it,” Dallimore explains. “It’s a bizarre assumption, because it’s not something easy to talk about. It’s not easy to say: ‘I’m going to perform cunnilingus on you, do you have any sensitivities in your vaginal region?’ That conversation
has to be guided by someone who’s been trained to have those conversations.”
Dallimore is one such person. No day is the same, she says. There are a lot of meetings: with the director, with the costume department – requesting nipple or genitalia coverings, discussing what costumes might reveal, or keep hidden – with the cinematographer, with the actors themselves. She’ll also check in with the crew about sensitivities: perhaps the production is filming an assault scene, which might be triggering to someone on set. Dallimore will navigate it all before filming begins, ensuring they receive the support they need.
Not all intimate content equates to straight-up sex scenes. Dallimore rattles off a list of scenarios that might require her services, ranging from full-on orgies – she choreographed a
foursome on her very first job, something she casually regales as one might recount a trip to the supermarket
– to nudity that isn’t sexual, such as getting in and out of a bath.
Rehearsing a simulated sex scene lasts for an hour at minimum. “We really clinically sculpt the scene,” Dallimore says. She asks the actors to get consent to touch different parts of their co-star’s body. Once that is achieved, she will guide them through movements. Then, her favourite part: “They start to relax! It’s so beautiful.” The director is presented with a few options and when everyone is happy, the choreography of the scene is “locked in”, ready for the actors to commit it to memory. There will be no surprises on the day of filming. The key, Dallimore stresses, is “making sure they’re not bringing their personal sexual life to that scene”, which is every actor’s deepest fear. “They think everyone in the room will be thinking: ‘Oh my God, is that how [they] have sex?’ That’s what we want to make sure does not happen.” When the sex scene is finally being filmed, Dallimore will stand by the monitor. “I always say if I look as if I’m not doing much on set, it means I’ve done my job properly beforehand.”
Given how many productions are currently filming in Australia, Dallimore wants intimacy coordinators to become standard practice locally. “I hope that an intimacy coordinator is as normal as a stunt director in the future,” Dallimore says. She thought it would take a decade for Australia to embrace the role – in fact, it’s been less than five years since O’Brien first set up her business. The success rate is a combination of a greater awareness of the work of intimacy coordinators, but also part of Hollywood’s reckoning with the dangerous workplace it created for the performers who work in it. “Bottom line, a set is a workplace,” Dallimore stresses. It should be safe for all.
The next step, O’Brien says, is to standardise the training, so that only those who have undergone professional schooling can call themselves an intimacy coordinator. Once accredited, these practitioners are available for guidance on whatever project needs it – and if the production involves any kind of intimate content, they definitely need it.
“Every time I go on a job, I think maybe I’m not necessary on this,” Dallimore says. “But then something happens, and someone grabs my hand, and goes: ‘Thank God you’re here!’”
“There’s this weird idea that because adults have sex, they somehow know how to act it” – Chloë Dallimore