News & Press

Intimacy Coordinator Ita O’Brien speaks to John Beattie about ageism for women in the industry, and how Intimacy Coordinators are helping to create healthier, more exciting, more nuanced intimate content on our screens.

Listen to the interview with Ita O’Brien live from the Women of the World Festival, on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour.

French language interview with Ita O’Brien on the role of Intimacy Coordinator and her experiences in shooting Sex Education.

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Taylor found the challenges of directing Sex Education – the hit Netflix show in which a young cast often perform explicit scenes – more considerable. He brought intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien on board. “A big part of what she did was help to demystify and take the fear away,” he says. “So actors weren’t dreading performing a sex scene.”

Note: this article is no longer available on the original link: theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/feb/05/horror-stories-how-to-shoot-ethical-sex-scene-ruth-wilson-affair-emilia-clarke-game-of-thrones

This tussle — between reason and the hormone-addled monster of adolescence — is just one of the arresting themes strung through a season that also covers (deep breath) chlamydia, bisexuality, middle-aged desire, douching in the gay community and, memorably, baba ganoush-based dirty talk.

However, Nunn (who, alongside the show’s other writers, works closely with intimacy co-ordinator Ita O’Brien) is conscious that Sex Education’s unflinching frankness never tips over into prurience that may worry actors.

“We’re constantly having open conversations, navigating the sensitive material, and if anybody did feel uncomfortable then it’s a very safe space for them to be able to voice that,” she says. “I also have a rule that sex scenes have to push the story forward or be educational in some way. That stops the show ever teetering into a gratuitous space or being titillating which, when you’re dealing with teenage characters [is a line] you have to tread very carefully.”

Last year, Game Of Thrones’s Emilia Clarke spoke of her “terrifying” early nude scenes on the show and inadvertently launched a wide debate about the pressure placed on inexperienced female actors to strip off on screen. Was Nunn conscious of this?

“It’s something I take very seriously,” she says. “Working with the intimacy coordinator is key to it. I feel that there’s a very interesting conversation to be had about whether we need as much gratuitous nudity on screen or whether we could pull back on that. Not just in our show but the industry in general.”

Nunn feels that there is a “purpose” to the show’s graphic content, both dramatically and — as per its name — educationally. Her decision to make horny sci-fi obsessive Lily (Tanya Reynolds) a sufferer of a sexually inhibiting condition called vaginismus has led to “quite a lot of messages” from grateful sufferers who didn’t realise they had a highly treatable medical condition. Tellingly, one of the most praised subplots from this new batch of episodes concerns a character who experiences a traumatising sexual assault that she initially tries to brush off with humour.

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Ita O’Brien’s work started long “before Weinstein.”

She drops the phrase “before Weinstein” like everyone is supposed to know what it means and everyone with any interest in show business does: that was the world before sexual harassment accusations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein finally surfaced; before the birth of the #MeToo movement.

O’Brien, who has a master’s in movement studies and works as a movement director, didn’t plan on becoming an intimacy coordinator—someone who coaches actors and filmmakers through sex scenes for stage and screen. It is a role O’Brien pioneered as she worked on her own material exploring the perspective of an abuser. “I knew that I needed to put in place practices and processes to keep my actors safe to help them explore that dynamic in a really healthy way,” she said. Soon, she was teaching her guidelines at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, one of the leading drama schools in the UK “That was in April 2015, and by the time Weinstein happened, I had already brought together the guidelines and subsequently, the role the intimacy coordinator has come from that. It certainly wasn’t my intention and it’s incredible that this is where I’ve ended up.”

Before Weinstein, said O’Brien, she was teaching drama students how to talk to directors about intimate content.

It’s a strong storyline for a show that is essentially a comedy, but Sex Education is unique. It dares to go where no other teenage drama has been before and portrays young sex (gay and straight) realistically and graphically . The assault story is expertly driven forward by a team of talented young actors, supported on set by the intimacy co-ordinator Ita O’Brien and an excellent script.

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While the intimate scenes in both seasons are always done tastefully, there’s no denying that even the most PG-13 of sex scenes require utmost care and precision — especially when working with young actors. The practice of hiring intimacy coordinators has become more and more commonplace in Hollywood, and “Sex Education” had some of the best from the jump. For Season 1, the cast worked with Ita O’brien, a theatrically trained actress and intimacy coordinator who has worked on shows such as “Gentleman Jack” and “Electric Dreams.” Her assistant David Thackeray was on hand for Season 2.

“Ita [O’Brien] was the intimacy coordinator, and before we started filming we had a whole day [with a] big ‘ole conversation with producers, directors, cast, about intimacy scenes, about our fears and worries, just a general conversation, really in depth, for hours,” series star Emma Mackey told IndieWire during an in-person interview. “Then in the afternoon, we had a workshop where we physicalized it more and we did animal rhythms and mating rhythms and stuff.”

As Maeve Wiley, the sexually liberated brains behind the sex therapy operation, Mackey had some of the most explicit intimacy scenes in Season 1.

Taylor and Nunn approached a woman called Ita O’Brien, who set up a company called Intimacy on Set, which provides ‘services to TV, film and theatre when dealing with intimacy, sexual content and nudity’.

“When we first started making series one, when we met we said, ‘I wonder if a character like this exists’,” Taylor explained, referring to the possibility of someone who could help with how intimate scenes are conducted.

“After a bit of research we found this lady called Ita O’Brien who came in and met us. We told her what we were making and how we wanted to approach it, and the sort of duty of care of what is primarily a really young cast – and that there were some quite difficult and specific scenes written.

“She came to us very much on the same page, as she had a manifesto that was sort of it tied in with the #MeToo movement.

Butterfield even credits his time working on the series with helping him feel more comfortable talking about sex, and realising “that it’s all normal. You don’t have to be embarrassed by it.” What has also helped him and other cast members not just open up more, but create a more comfortable and safe space for filming sexual scenes was having intimacy director Ita O’Brien on set. The role of an intimacy director or coordinator has been a welcome addition to Hollywood sets in recent years, with shows like The Deuce, Euphoria, Watchmen, and Crashing employing Alicia Rodis and her nonprofit Intimacy Directors International to ensure safety and comfort for performers doing sex scenes.

“It was a real support,” said Gatwa. “We never felt alone. They could be quite isolating and scary and intimidating, those scenes, but you always felt you had someone in your corner.”

Prior to filming, Gatwa explained, O’Brien led a workshop in which the actors broke the ice by emulating various animals mating. They gathered and pretended to be monkeys, lions, slugs, and other members of the animal kingdom straight up doing the deed.

It was to help us loosen up a bit and get to know each other, but also it helped us think about how sex is so personal and everyone has a rhythm, or noise style. So it helped us find your character’s animal, so to speak,” said Butterfield. “It’s not like you’re going to have sex like a monkey or slug, but you just use bits of it.”

Gatwa thinks the mission behind Sex Education is important. “”As much as sex positivity is great, teenagers feel a lot of pressure. You need to learn how to fall in love with your body as well, and you’re doing that as a teenager,” he said. “These storylines are so empowering. It’s an honour that we get to portray them.”

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“I’m really glad I had Sex Ed to kick me off, because on Eiffel I’m naked,” she says. Sex Education was among the first shows to publicly announce the appointment of an “intimacy coordinator”, Ita O’Brien, to coach young actors through delicate scenes and safeguard against any pre-MeToo behaviour on set. O’Brien’s first ice-breaker for the cast was to have them watch videos of animals having sex, and attempt to imitate them. The stars could find the animal they felt best meshed with their character, and choreograph their sex scenes accordingly. “Honestly, I was watching it thinking, what the hell is this job? It’s absurd,” says Mackey. “But it was also a really good way of bonding. It was a great day, like being part of some really odd drama school.” 

Does Mackey think O’Brien’s role is necessary? “Yes, it totally demystifies and desensationalises what might be a really intimidating sex scene. And getting to know each other beforehand is a real luxury, because sometimes you rock up and you have to film an intimate scene and strike up chemistry with an actor you’ve never met before in your life. Luckily, too, our show isn’t about ridiculously passionate, romantic sexual intercourse.”

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The show’s commitment to approaching female pleasure in an unbiased, non-judgmental way shouldn’t be surprising considering Sex Education was the first Netflix series to employ use of an intimacy coordinator. Ita O’Brien, a trained dancer, actress, movement director and intimacy coordinator, helped develop the Intimacy On Set Guidelines that have sparked a change in the way TV and film approach filming scene simulating sex and nudity. While O’Brien spent years training theater groups in these practices and developing the now widely referenced guidelines, Sex Education marked the first series to seriously use her expertise.

“The idea of creating time and space for rehearsal of the intimate content wasn’t there, and there was pushback from that. The production, if there’s a fight or a dance, they will make time, they’ll know they have to put in a schedule time to choreograph, time to rehearse, and that’s the shift that we were asking for in the industry,” O’Brien explains.

It was an ask that Sex Education director Ben Taylor eagerly said yes to.

O’Brien held a workshop for the cast a crew a few weeks before filming began. “I share how the guidelines work, and then they get up on stage doing a warmup,” O’Brien says. “Each of the actors look at the different scenes that they had and then I put them into groups, and we worked through the various scenes, helping them find the structure, the guidelines. And it was a joyous day, it was so lovely. And, of course, in asking people to get hot and sweaty together, physical work just helps to make a connection with each other, to help to open that ensemble feeling.”

Sex Education doesn’t shy away from raunchy scenes seeing Otis and the gang get steamy between the sheets. But while both teenage angst and dreams are at the heart of the binge-worthy series, we can’t help but feel some of the more seductive scenarios might get awkward on set. Talking about the secrets behind those ‘realistic’ sex scenes, intimacy co-ordinator (yes, that’s a thing) Ita O’Brien has opened up on how they keep the cast as comfortable as possible.

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O’Brien told news.com.au that one of the significant developments in the industry brought on by the MeToo movement and multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against Harvey Weinstein was that it had “invited a positive ‘no’ in the industry”.

“We want to know your ‘no’. We want to know what’s not suitable for you as a person, and we can work creatively with an actor with your agreement and consent and help the production. When we work from a clear ‘yes’ from the actors, it’ll be a way better sex scene because the actor can be free, they can be open, which you can see from the scenes in Sex Education.”

Intimacy co-ordinators like O’Brien are also skilled to choreograph the intimate content – that could involve where camera angles might go or where legs are placed.

“We have an understanding of physicality, body movements and anatomy, and of an actor’s process and how they can serve the script,” she said.

Ideally, O’Brien would be able to have time during rehearsals to go through the process, but she has found that “old school people” are still resistant to what she brings.

Intimacy Coordinator and Movement Director, Ita O’Brien, joins the podcast this week to talk about her work which involves establishing best practice when dealing with intimacy, sexual content and nudity in film, television and theatre. Georgie finds out about the brilliant productions Ita has worked on, such as ‘Sex Education’ on Netflix and why the work of Intimacy Coordinators is so important in this industry.

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​With Netflix’s Sex Education returning to our screens next week, Ita O’Brien, the show’s expert intimacy coordinator, will be in Elephant & Castle’s London College of Communication (UAL) for a seminar on how actors and directors work to support the actor.

The industry is now embracing intimacy coordination on set and stage with the help of experts like O’Brien, to provide support to the industry in the post #MeToo landscape.