News & Press

An “intimacy director” was brought into Suranne Jones’s new drama to mastermind her lesbian love scenes.

In Gentleman Jack, Suranne plays Anne Lister, a 19th century lesbian landowner given her nickname because of her taste for dark, masculine clothes.

The production’s intimacy director Ita O’Brien, who has worked on a wide range of TV and theatre shows, says she consulted a lesbian handbook compiled from Lister’s coded diaries to ensure the sex was always authentic.

She said: “I was looking at several books and I got hold of the lesbian handbook again to make sure I’m look­­ing at the focus and equality of queer relationships.”

Ms O’Brien said one of the challenges was helping the actresses playing Lister’s lovers to feel valued, when they sometimes had no lines “other than sexual noises”.

She said: “We have to make that person feel really important because she’s an integral part of the drama – so it wasn’t just an empty moment of full-on orgasm.”

Producer Faith Penhale said hiring O’Brien was a positive reaction to the #MeToo movement.

She said: “A huge part of Anne Lister’s life was her sex life. She was very sexually active and loved having sex with other women. You have to think about how you take care of the people who are going to play that.”

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MeToo has created a new profession: Intimacy Coordinators like Ita O’Brien are supposed to make sure that there are no assaults when shooting erotic scenes. The sex in the film can only be better.

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BBC Scotland speaks to Ita O’Brien about her work as an Intimacy Coordinator – what it entails, and how important this work is.

Anne Lister also happened to love women, and enjoyed a healthy sex life, so the Doctor Foster actor says the show’s creator – award-winning writer Sally Wainwright – hired an intimacy co-ordinator so that she could depict the sex scenes convincingly and with sensitivity.

“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, ” Suranne told The 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.”

Intimacy coach Ita O’Brien advises sex scenes are meticulously planned in advance, explaining, “Fight scenes in films are carefully ­choreographed and rehearsed. Sex scenes should be the same.”

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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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