News & Press

By Simon Hattenstone

He pays tribute to intimacy coordinator extraordinaire Ita O’Brien, who introduced the Intimacy on Set guidelines in 2017 and worked on Normal People as well as It’s a Sin. “Anything with sex in it, she’ll be involved. She’ll be on all fours at one point, saying: ‘Now I’m going to be like a cow and moo in ecstasy.’ She’s amazing, amazing, amazing.” And yes, he did start to enjoy the scenes.

Did he find them arousing? Now it’s my turn to blush and I apologise for the question. Did he start to enjoy it too much? “No, that’s what I want to know. What if someone gets a hard-on – how embarrassing would that be? Ita said: ‘It’s natural and normal for certain body parts to get excited and if you get an erection that’s absolutely fine, but it’s not appropriate for the workplace.’” He adds a caveat: “Depending on what kind of job you’re doing. And she said: ‘If that happens, you just take a time out. So you’re all there thinking, OK, how embarrassing – because you say time out and everybody knows it’s because you’ve got a hard-on. Hahahhaa!” Did he have to take a time out? “No!” Did anyone? “Not to my knowledge.”

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“When Normal People came out during that first lockdown, it was long enough for people to be feeling bereft of that physical contact,” explains Ita O’Brien, who worked as an intimacy coordinator on the show, in addition to Sex Education, I May Destroy You and Industry. “And I think it did help people to live vicariously through these characters.”

The shows were all shot in 2019 and released this year, says O’Brien, and so avoided any disruption from Covid. “The irony is that the intimacy coordination has allowed for better intimate scenes to be created – and then with our lack of touch, they [the scenes] have impacted so much more.”

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Ita O’Brien, who worked on the programme as well as 18 other shows in the last 12 months, explained how her work as an intimacy co-ordinator has made sex on screen both more enjoyable, as well as more educational, for actors and viewers. 

“We are now watching intimate content where actors have consented and feel comfortable performing well-choreographed scenes,’ she explains. ‘We’re not squirming internally because the actors involved aren’t squirming internally. Now, the intimate content helps tell the story and can have a huge impact, as the actor is now being cared for and their needs aren’t being compromised during sex scenes.”

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BY NIKKI BAUGHAN

The UK’s Ita O’Brien has become one of the industry’s most in-demand intimacy co-ordinators, with credits that include Normal People, I May Destroy You, The Dig and Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel. She has spent six years developing best practices around scenes of intimacy, sexual content and nudity on stage and screen through her company Intimacy on Set, but it has been the rise of the #MeToo movement that has propelled her work into the spotlight. O’Brien is now working on Reed Morano’s adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power and Sarah Adina Smith’s Birds Of Paradise, both for Amazon Studios. 

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By Ruth Kinane

A TV show came out in 2020 that — quarantine or no quarantine — made us all sad and horny. We’re talking, of course, about the BBC and Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s best-selling novel Normal People, starring Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones. Since there’s been enough sad this year to last us a lifetime, let’s talk about sex instead. The show’s intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien (founder of Intimacy on Set and author of the Intimacy on Set guidelines, which protect performers during scenes that involve sex or nudity), takes us inside the creation of those steamy scenes. 

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Before we get into Normal People, tell me about the role of an intimacy coordinator and why it’s so necessary?

ITA O’BRIEN: Think about it this way, if you’re reading a script and there’s a waltz, you realize people don’t necessarily know how to waltz, so we need a specialist choreographer to teach that. Or if we’re going to put swords in someone’s hands, of course, people don’t just know how to do sword play, we’re going to need a practitioner. Then there was this gap. Just like a waltz, a sex scene is also a body dance and just like a fight, there’s a risk and the risk is it makes someone vulnerable about being naked or being touched in places that aren’t suitable. There was this sense that, well, everybody does sex, so we don’t need to teach technique. Then there’s the realization of, actually, no, people are vulnerable. And, as with any choreographed dance, you need a specialist practitioner to help everybody talk about it properly and professionally and not gloss over consent. Consent is needed both for touch and nudity, and of simulated sexual content. So there’s need for a prep practitioner. Just like a choreographer, that practitioner puts clear choreography into place and brings in techniques. Of course, at the beginning, I had no idea that I’d end up helping to create a role of a practitioner that’s now known as the intimacy coordinator.

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Intimacy on Set provided Intimacy Coordinators for four of the ten listed shows here, I May Destroy You, Normal People, I Hate Suzie, and Industry!

On Normal People:
“It’s also first time we’ve seen sex on-screen performed so authentically and non-gratuitously, thanks to intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, marking a new way in which sex scenes will be safely handled in the future.”

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By Toby Earle

One fascinating aspect of Gus is that he’s outwardly risk-averse yet risks so much in his affair with Theo (Will Tudor). How did you find working with an intimacy co-ordinator, particularly in the scene where he turns up drunk at Theo’s house?

I’m too young to understand what it would have been like before intimacy co-ordinators came along but I’m so grateful for them. Ita O’Brien and Miriam Lucia did an amazing job across the whole season and we do have our fair share of intimate moments.

They did a wonderful job of breaking down every single beat and every single movement. I know it sounds awkward, but actually it was the least awkward part of the entire process, because they managed to find a way of normalising everything and making sure you were entirely comfortable. You’re playing with something that’s very, very personal and we’re all very young, so we had to find where we were comfortable, especially when we go to places that are so uncomfortable. It’s a wonderful leap forward in the industry and I’m super grateful to experience it in one of my first roles.

That scene was the last scene on a day’s filming. We did it about four different times and every time we did it all the way through. In that scene I cross the threshold of Theo’s house. Now, Will used to play rugby and I’ve messed about with it as well, so in that scene we genuinely just scrummed, pushing each other across the threshold, back and forth, for about 15 seconds.

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By Ben Allen

“We had an intimacy coordinator [Ita O’Brien], who was amazing and ultimately the fact that the scenes look really true and organic,” he explained. “But the main thing is me and Daisy felt safe because we had an amazing crew and amazing set of directors on this and it just gave us an opportunity to make something that felt like two young people in a really healthy relationship.”

While the scenes still makes him squeamish, he says he’s happy that they are out in the world. “It’s not nice to watch for me, but nice to be involved in. It’s something that I’m really proud that the world gets to see, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of in any way, shape or form.”

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BY  ALGERINO MARRONCELLI

An intimacy coordinator is a professional figure, halfway between the choreographer and the stunt coordinator , who takes care of setting up the scenes with sexual content, making sure that a creative process is always transparent and based on consent. Until a few years ago, she was a rather unknown figure. But in a short time, especially as a consequence of the #metoo movement, it has become a very popular profession on the sets of films and television series.

(Translation from Italian)

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Michaela Coel: One big change I’d like to see in the industry in 2021

“Wouldn’t it be dreamy if intimacy directors could be employed on all sets where there is physical intimacy or scenes of a sexual nature? Wouldn’t it also be dreamy if independent projects shooting such scenes referred to Ita O’Brien’s “Intimacy on Set Guidelines,” if they feel unable to afford an intimacy director? It’s very useful and worth taking into consideration to keep all on set safe.

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By Velvet Winter

After decades of unrealistic and offputting sex on screen (*cough* Game Of Thrones *cough*) one woman is on a mission to bring authentic and consensual intimacy to our Netflix binges.

You’re eyes haven’t been betraying you, sex on screen has been getting better!

If you’ve watched Sex Education, Normal People or I May Destroy You then you will have enjoyed the work of intimacy co-ordinator Ita O’Brian.

But what exactly is an intimacy coordinator?
“An intimacy co-ordinator is a practitioner that brings open communication and transparency to the intimate content in a process that invites agreement and consent of simulated content, nudity and touch,” Ita told triple j.

Basically she makes sex scenes safe, fun and open for all those involved – and no, you can’t hire her for your regular life (we asked).

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Normal People’s intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien reveals how she works with actors to make steamy, believable sex scenes. Watch the interview and read the video transcript.

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Love the way shows like Normal People, I May Destroy You and Sex Education deal with sex? We chat to Ita O’Brien, the intimacy co-ordinator behind these authentic, groundbreaking sex scenes.

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By Chris Harvey

There is a lot of sex in Sky’s Brave New World. I wonder if Brown Findlay had an oh-my-god moment when she saw the script. First off, she says, she’d only been given the pages for the first episode before her audition and “learnt more about quantity, let’s say, as the show went on”.

The series turned out to be something of a trial run for the intimacy co-ordinators who have been widely introduced since the Me Too movement alerted the world to abuse in the world of film and television. “What has massively changed, for me, in the industry is that when I started out, it was a negotiation … ‘We want to see this,’ and it was like, ‘Well, I don’t want to show you that. I can maybe show you this’. It was all a push and pull.”

On the set of Brave New World, she says, she would consult the intimacy co-ordinators “basically every single time there is something intimate – and that’s not even just sex stuff”. “You negotiate with them, you talk to them,” she says. “You think, ‘How do I feel today, in my body, right now?’ When I was younger, I had no idea I could say no. And when I tried to sometimes in the past, it just didn’t go down well – ‘You’re new, we can find someone else.’ It was very manipulative. So, this was actually an amazing experience, considering the show. It was the safest and the most comfortable I’ve ever felt.”

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We really hope you enjoy listening to Jennifer Te Atamira Ward-Lealand sharing her career journey with you as part of The Female Career podcast.

Jennifer has worked extensively in theatre, film, television, musicals and radio for 40 years, as an Actor, Director, and Board Member. Her stage and screen work includes everything from Twelfth Night to Xena: Warrior Princess. She is also a trained intimacy coordinator.

Jennifer was a founding board member of the Watershed Theatre and a co-founder of the drama school, The Actors’ Program. She is President of Equity New Zealand (since 2008), Patron of Q Theatre and Theatre New Zealand and serves as a trust board member of the Actors Benevolent Fund. In 2018 she was named SPADA Industry Champion and in the 2019 New Year’s Honours List, she was named a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) for services to theatre, film and television and presented with a Woman of Influence Award (for arts and culture).  Most recently, Jennifer was honoured as the Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year 2020. 

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By Naman Ramachandran

​Mescal and Edgar-Jones were part of the conversation from the very beginning in order for them to feel comfortable, Abrahamson said. As the intimate scenes were a central dimension of the story, the production worked closely with intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, who created a space where the participants were encouraged to be completely honest about a scene and speak out if they were uncomfortable.

“After the initial awkwardness of the nakedness, it became creatively satisfying,” Abrahamson said. “A lot of that awkwardness that would normally attend the entire process of shooting scenes like that in a conventional approach, a lot of that just went away.”

“The idea of shooting those scenes may be far more anxious than the actual shooting process from day to day,” said Mescal. “There’s an awkward 10 minutes when you’re like, okay, I have to be relatively naked in front of a group of strangers… from an actor’s perspective you’ve got to treat that the same way you would a scene where you’re speaking to each other.”

“Another element that I was proud that was part of the series was the equality in nudity between Paul and I, I think that’s really important,” said Edgar-Jones. “Also, if you’re trying to tell the truth about a relationship, you have to also include the truth of what that means in terms of intimacy.”

“Having a sense of why certain scenes are happening and what is being communicated meant that we could just approach them like we would approach any dialogue scene. It became about the story,” Edgar-Jones added.

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BY ROSIE HUMPHREY

As trauma reverberates through these characters’ lives, it’s important that the actors portraying them are psychologically safe and supported. That’s why Ita O’Brien, a U.K.-based intimacy coordinator, was vital to the construction of these intimate moments, choreographing each move, or “beat” as O’Brien calls it, to create a seamless structure of intimacy and realism between the actors.

To ensure this realism is enacted safely, each beat is composed down to the placement of hands or a certain number of thrusts in order to protect the actors’ emotional and physical boundaries. As the architect of safe spaces on set, O’Brien worked closely with the artist well-being practitioner, Louise Platt, a qualified psychotherapist, who was on call to provide emotional and psychological support for the actors while they performed sensitive content.

This integrated approach of therapeutic support feels quite revolutionary, as Platt mentioned on Twitter and unfortunately is a practice that, until the Me Too movement, wasn’t always followed. The infamous sex scene in Blue Is the Warmest Colour is a prominent example where actors found a sequence distressing to perform; leads Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux described the 10 grueling days of filming as “horrible” and “really suffering.” After Hollywood’s awakening, O’Brien pioneered the role of intimacy coordinator and developed the Intimacy on Set guidelines to ensure that scenes of nudity, intimacy, and simulated sex are performed safely without compromising the actors’ personal boundaries.

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