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Wainwright and Jones both wanted to ensure that Anne’s queerness was depicted realistically and fairly, so Wainwright hired a lesbian adviser and an intimacy adviser to coordinate the sex scenes. Jones appreciated having the experts available to her. “I think, in the current climate, every show should have [an intimacy adviser],” Jones says. “It just makes everyone safe and comfortable. We had someone that we could talk to if there were any questions.”

“I wanted to make a point of not being gratuitous,” Wainwright says of the sex scenes. “But I wanted to combine that with making a big character. Anne Lister was a great lover, and her sex was very evolved. I think we shot the scenes in a way that’s very beautiful, very apt.”

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The actress said she it was “liberating” to work with Ita O’Brien. “I was quite nervous about the sex scenes we had to do, because I thought they should be approached as sensitively as they could be,” she told the Daily Mirror.

“One of the great things she brought was an articulacy – we could talk about the scenes. She just started talking about body parts and positions in a matter of fact way, which just liberated us all. As well as helping us sculpt the sex scenes, the positions, she’s also there to provide support to the artists.”

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Suranne Jones shocked US viewers last night with a heavy lesbian sex scene for new drama, Gentleman Jack.

The real-life story, which follows the tale of lesbian businesswoman Anne Lister in 1832, saw Suranne jump between the sheets with a married aristocrat, Marianna Lawton (Lydia Leonard).

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“We had intimacy directors just so we could tell the story in a very sympathetic and sensitive way.”

“We wanted to explore the way she had sexual affairs because it’s all in there in the diaries. It’s very personal.”

“We wanted someone who was able to give us a language so no one felt embarrassed and we could just talk about every aspect.”

Note: this article is no longer available on the original link: www.metro.news/suranne-jones-called-in-an-intimacy-expert-for-her-racy-sex-scenes-in-gentleman-jack/1530820/

Suranne Jones has revealed a sex guru helped her overcome her nerves at filming lesbian romps for her new drama, Gentleman Jack. The Doctor Foster actress, 40, said show writer Sally Wainwright hired ­intimacy co‑ordinator Ita O’Brien to give advice on how to behave convincingly.

She said: “I was quite nervous about the sex scenes we had to do, because I thought they should be approached as sensitively as they could be.”
“One of the great things she brought was an articulacy – we could talk about the scenes.”
“She just started talking about body parts and positions in a matter of fact way, which just liberated us all.
“As well as helping us sculpt the sex scenes, the positions, she’s also there to provide support to the artists.”

O’Brien advises that sex scenes are carefully worked out in advance, saying: “Fight scenes in films are carefully ­choreographed and rehearsed. Sex scenes should be the same.”

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Gentleman Jack star Suranne Jones talks to People Now about the show and using Intimacy Practitioners on set.

How do sex scenes work? Intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien says before she came along a director would often send the actors off on their own to figure out their own boundaries. Now, Ita has created a set of guidelines that she says makes the sex scenes filmed today, even steamier and more realistic.

Today, we learn how to choreograph a sex scene so that every angle, every touch and every emotion is as beautifully rehearsed as any battle. Listen to the podcast with Claire Murphy and Ita O’Brien.

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The role of the intimacy coordinator has become more important in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations and the broader #MeToo movement. This short film published by The Guardian explores how intimacy coordinators work with actors on sex scenes. Featuring insights from Ita O’Brien as she works on the short film Keep Breathing, breaking down the choreography of a sex scene to ensure the wellbeing of the actors and create a clear language and process.

Ita O’Brien, an intimacy coordinator based in England, said that sex scenes often get handled poorly — not out of malice, but avoidance of what many feel is an awkward situation. “Actors being left vulnerable, or feeling harassed and abused, hasn’t been [the result of] a director or producer not wanting to do well. It’s because they’re not comfortable talking about the sexual content,” she said.

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In one of the most poignant scenes in Netflix’s hit series Sex Education, Eric — the loveable french horn player with eccentric wardrobe taste — is pinned to the ground by Adam, a boy that has bullied him relentlessly for most of his school life. In an act of defence, Eric spits directly into his bully’s face. Adam retaliates with the same. Then they stop. A second passes. Suddenly, they kiss.

It’s a moment that can’t help but leave you electrified — by its tenderness, its innocence, but, above all, its spontaneity. A kiss is the last thing the viewer expects to see, and, by the looks of things, it comes as a bit of a shock to Eric and Adam, too. However, the truth is, of course, that hours of planning went into these brief few seconds. Each beat of the scene was choreographed with detailed precision.

Ita O’Brien begins with the basics. Where will the two boys be positioned? What areas of their bodies will be touching? How long will the kiss last? How many kisses will there be?

Then there’s the more complicated stuff. The spitting.

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“Somehow, everybody can understand an actor’s acting in all other realms of human expression, apart from the sex scene,” concurs movement director and intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien. “It’s that thing of ‘oh, how can it look sexy if they’re acting it’ but the sex scene is still acting—it’s not real life.” O’Brien has been developing ways to keep actors in safe in these scenarios since 2015. Through first engineering her own drama, writing a theatre piece focused around abuse, she began to examine the dynamic between the perpetrator and the victim, which led to broader thinking about the blind spot for potential abuse within the industry.

As she explains by phone, “I was aware I needed to put in place a clear practice and a process to help my actors stay safe.” The Intimacy on Set guidelines—which range from excluding sex scenes from screen tests to identifying specific body parts that can be touched—were born from this initial momentum, coupled with the work of a colleague at the Central School of Speech and Drama: Vanessa Ewan, a senior movement tutor who had noted the time and space afforded fight directors to create their sequences and suggested sex scenes and those with intimate content should be done the same way.

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To prevent harassment on TV and film sets, production houses are hiring so-called intimacy coordinators to oversee sex scenes. NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Ita O’Brien, who serves that role on Netflix’s Sex Education.

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They range from a boy who does creative things with a warm melon and a girl who vomits on her boyfriend’s penis, to a teenager with rampant pubic hair (“I’m like a wolverine”) and a virgin who writes a sci-fi comic whose heroine goes “on a quest for an alien dick to deflower her”. All of adolescent carnality is there in Sex Education, the super-stylised Netflix comedy that has seized the imagination like no British school series since Skins and which the streaming service claims has been watched by 40 million households around the world.

If you’re a member of the twentysomething cast, how do you prepare for such a kaleidoscopic bombardment of rumpy pumpy? Well, as the Bloodhound Gang once sang: “You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals/ So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.” Yes, before shooting started, the actors took part in an animal-inspired shagging workshop.

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Aimee-Lou Wood: We had an intimacy coordinator there all the time – she was so helpful. And there were conversations going on for weeks, so you were kind of ready for it when it happened. It was well prepared, those scenes felt the most cathartic and the most rewarding. I was probably more prepared for the sex scenes than I was for any other scenes. It was harder to do just talking…

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“I believe there is always another way to do a scene where no one is vulnerable, so I tell them their ‘no’ is a gift.”

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To do so, Netflix relies on a crew of writers, directors and producers who’ve brought a keen sense of fluid, inclusive teenage sexuality to a series about a 16-year-old son of a sex therapist, Otis (Asa Butterfield), and his enterprising friend Maeve (Emma Mackey). Together they team up to give sex advice to their perpetually inflamed cohort at Moordale Secondary School. (Ncuti Gatwa and Gillian Anderson round out the show’s stellar leading cast.)

But scenes like the one between Hewkin and Newmark unravel seamlessly, thanks particularly to the show’s intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, who works with the actors before, during and after their sex scenes to ensure that standards of safety are met and that the delightfully complicated choreography is performed efficiently.

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There’s so much repressed aggression released in their hookup scene that it begins as a literal, physical fight. How did you and Connor Swindells approach filming that? Also, I have to ask, did you actually spit in each other’s faces?

No. [Laughs.] We blocked that really carefully and mimed the spitting, then we’d cut and add artificial spit to our cheeks. It does look real, but we were very cautious of trying to be as respectful of each other as possible. On Sex Education, we had an intimacy director, Ita O’Brien, who was there to give us guidance with those scenes. Before we started filming, we had an intimacy workshop. The whole cast and crew was there. Everybody gave examples of sex scenes they’d done before and we had great conversations about how those made them feel. We had conversations about consent and feeling comfortable with your sex scenes. Then we moved on to [laughs] emulating the mating rhythms of snails, lions, dogs, and more. It was very physical work!

We all got to know each other very quickly in that workshop, but it was great because it meant that by the time we got to shooting that scene, the walls had already been broken down. Ita was also on set for it and every sex scene. Before the scene, we choreographed it. It’s literally like a dance. We’d agree between us about where we could touch, how long we’d kiss, and then have those counts in our head when we filmed it. We felt very taken-care-of, so shooting that scene became like another day at the office. 

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