How staged sex got safer
EMILY Meade felt uneasy. The actress, who plays a porn star on HBO’s The Deuce, was about to film one of the most vulnerable scenes of her career – a graphic sequence in which she had to simulate oral sex.
At one point, she was supposed to stand in the corner, half-nude, while other characters spoke.
“Reading that was a bit scary. I’m not only a little worried about the act of doing that, which is pretty vulnerable and potentially embarrassing, but with the internet, there’s going to be images of me, topless, pretending to give oral sex, for the rest of my life,” she said.
She asked Alicia Rodis, an on-set intimacy co-ordinator and co-founder of Intimacy Directors International, to walk through the sequence with Uta Briesewitz, the episode’s director. Rodis helped Meade have a conversation about her concerns and discussed the possibility of using a robe.
As a result, Meade felt comfortable because it “gave me the confidence to know we’re all on the same page”. And in the end, the director decided not to show any close-up images of Meade in the act.
In the past, this wouldn’t have been much of a conversation – if at all – because productions didn’t work with intimacy co-ordinators.
With the rise of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, however, structural changes in Hollywood are underfoot as the industry shifts from the old, problematic phrase “that’s just how things are” to facing issues of consent, harassment and sexual assault head-on.
The changes have found their way onto sets, which are increasingly staffed with intimacy co-ordinators – movement coaches who help choreograph intimate scenes with a focus on actors’ safety.
“This in an industry where actors are told that ‘Yes, and’ is the only answer,” Rachel Flesher, an intimacy co-ordinator who worked on Netflix’s Glow, said. “Not just ‘Yes’. It’s ‘Yes, and I’ll do more, and I’ll do anything’. And their hireability is based off their willingness to do whatever it takes.”After hiring Rodis to work on The Deuce, HBO declared in October that it would require intimacy co-ordinators for all shows containing intimate scenes.
Co-ordinators can also be found on sets for Netflix’s Sex Education and Amazon’s Electric Dreams.
Much of the discussion around intimacy co-ordinators began with Meade, who has acted since she was a teenager but learnt about intimacy co-ordinators only after landing her role on The Deuce, a show about the prostitution and porn worlds of 1970s New York City.
As filming went on, she though there should be an ambassador of sorts for sex and nude scenes, someone to ensure everything ran smoothly and gave a voice to the actors. Following Meade’s request, HBO hired Rodis, and she is training new co-ordinators for HBO to handle the physical and the emotional aspects of the job.
One role intimacy co-ordinators play is helping choreograph scenes with the actors’ boundaries at the forefront. That can mean monitoring actors’ hand placements or ensuring they have genital barriers and guaranteeing that no one is pressured into nudity that wasn’t agreed upon. They also speak to actors, crew members and directors to guarantee no one is emotionally hurt by a scene.