News & Press: Press

Grazia’s entertainment reporter Ogo A caught up with the Jodie Comer and Ridley Scott to talk about their new movie The Last Duel. The film follows the story of Marguerite de Carrouges who claims to have been raped by her husband’s best friend and squire Jacques Le Gris and her husband, Jean de Carrouges, challenges him to trial by combat, the last legally sanctioned duel in France’s history. Find out what drew Jodie and Ridley to the project and what the support and atmosphere was like on set.

As you’ll gather from the wildly explicit opening scenes of every season so far, little is left to the imagination on Sex Education. The cast have been guided throughout by intimacy coordinators like Ita O’Brien, who also worked on Normal People.

According to Ncuti Gatwa, who plays fan-favourite character Eric, filming any intimate scenes during the pandemic was “tricky”.

“Everyone’s got their masks on, and from a distance, you can’t hear what anyone’s saying,” he laughs. “It just made everything take longer. But at the same time, we carried on with the same process that we had since Season 1. The intimacy directors were very much involved in every intimate scene.”

“Working with the intimacy coordinator was great – it felt like a dance routine,” adds Chinenye Ezeudu, who plays the ambitious, newly appointed Head Girl Viv. “We all knew the steps we were going to do – whether we were going to touch people’s hands, and kiss them. It was very safe. We had conversations beforehand. Some people, when they’re doing sex scenes, they have an animal in mind. Some people have sloths, or slugs. We did a whole workshop with Ita.”

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By Charlotte Durand

Britain’s Ita O’Brien is one of cinema’s unsung stars, ensuring actors are comfortable filming their most sensitive scenes in a job she has made her own.

The 56-year-old intimacy coordinator has been a key figure behind the sex scenes in acclaimed series such as “I May Destroy You”, “Sex Education” and “Normal People”. 

Preserving the intimacy of an artist filming a rape depiction, setting up a sex scene with a virgin actor and identifying the limits each actor is comfortable with are all issues that O’Brien is regularly confronted with.  

A typical conversation she regularly has with stars, she told AFP, goes along the lines: “He is going put his hand here, you put yours there and then you start the fellatio.” 

She sees her role as one of ensuring “open communication” between the director and the actors on all intimate scenes that may include kissing, nudity or sex.

By Liz Shannon Miller

That’s wonderful. To wrap up, as an actor, you’ve had plenty of experience with nudity and sex scenes — what was it like directing sequences like that?

MORTIMER: It was really interesting. I mean, I was very set in that I wanted something like that, because the story was sort of Linda’s journey, through her romantic life, was about coming to a place where she was sort of sexually liberated and felt quite awakened sexually. And that it was something that she could embrace without feeling ashamed of it. So I wanted that sex scene between her and Fabrice [Assaad Bouab] to be really sexy, but yet feel… I mean, I find sex scenes often very embarrassing to watch, and I wanted it to be sexy without being cringe-y and also to feel like it was kind of from a woman’s point of view somehow.

And so, they have these things now called intimacy coordinators. And we had this incredible woman who did the love scenes from Normal People, Ita O’Brien, who’s a real artist. It’s almost like choreographing a dance, and we spoke at length with her, and I thought of great moments in sex scenes that I’ve loved in movies, and I used that a bit and we kind of put them all together in this kind of strange… Really, the most electric moment in falling in love with someone or getting into a sexual relationship with someone is that first touch, when they first touch you, or you first touch them, and you know that you’re both thinking about the thing. And I wanted to kind of riff on that moment. And so, then I developed this whole kind of flash-forward thing.

Lily was just incredible and so open and up for it. And I was very careful to make Lily and Emily [Beecham] feel that in any moments where there was nudity that they could watch it with me and come back into the monitor. And we watched it together and worked out what looked good and what didn’t. It was a collaboration really. I guess that’s what it was. It was all of us talking and all of us working it out and being very open about it.

I’ve done a lot of those kinds of scenes in my life. And it often can feel like somebody just died or something. It’s very funereal and there’s this sort of hush sort of church-like sort of atmosphere on a set when people have to take their clothes off, which makes it much more embarrassing. And nobody’s talking, and nobody’s looking you in the eye. It’s something that we really feel so sort of, I don’t know, awkward and self-conscious, and I just wanted it to not be like that. I wanted it to be like, we’re all chatting and we’re here.

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By Mark Brown

Too many film and television bosses still do not understand the value of intimacy coordinators and hire them purely as a box-ticking exercise, one of the industry’s leading figures has said.

Ita O’Brien was celebrated on Sunday by the actor and writer Michaela Coel, who dedicated her best actress Bafta to the “essential” work she did on I May Destroy You. Coel spoke powerfully of the “internal devastation” she had felt working on shows that had no intimacy coordinator.

It was a description O’Brien was familiar with. “It is so fantastic that she put it like that because that is absolutely what happens,” O’Brien told the Guardian. “In every single workshop I do, everyone will have a story.”

After the Harvey Weinstein revelations and the #MeToo movement, demand for O’Brien’s services increased from 2018. But she said she had been hired for productions where the director did not want her involved.

“Really I was just a box-ticking exercise for the producers. I was told check in with the actors … and then do nothing,” she said. Was that still the case? “Yes, yes, yes … absolutely.”

O’Brien recalled one production where she asked for gender parity in the crew filming a sex scene, which otherwise would be almost all men. “I got told ‘don’t ask for that. What you’re doing is now impacting on the production adversely and we’ll have none of it.’ There have been many times I’ve walked away from sets and it has so been hard and I’m feeling: can I keep doing this?”

She said there had also been shows where the experience was a positive one, including Sex Education, It’s a Sin, Normal People and, of course, I May Destroy You, which was the standout show at Sunday’s Baftas.

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The standout winner at the 2021 TV Baftas was Ita O’Brien, and she wasn’t even nominated for an award.

O’Brien was the intimacy coordinator on Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, which won best mini-series and Leading Actress for Coel. But O’Brien also worked on Normal People (with Leading Actor winner Paul Mescal) and Sex Education (for which Aimee Lou Wood won Best Female Performance in a Comedy Programme) as well as The Third Day, Gangs of London and I Hate Suzie, all of which were nominated.

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Michaela Coel and her hit drama I May Destroy You won big at the 2021 television Baftas on Sunday – with Coel dedicating her acting award to the series’ intimacy coordinator.

Accepting awards for a show that dealt with sexual abuse and consent, Coel said film and television sets were vulnerable places for actors and crew members. Not to have intimacy experts was “thoughtless” and showed a “lack of mindfulness”, she added.

I May Destroy You was one of the cultural events of 2020, in any genre, described by the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan as “astonishing, beautiful, thrilling”. The BBC and HBO series was inspired by Coel’s own experience of sexual assault by strangers after her drink was spiked. It is about the aftermath of a rape and is often called a “a sexual consent drama” but it is also a story of fun, friendship and more.

Coel was named best actress and dedicated her Bafta to the series’ intimacy director, Ita O’Brien. “Thank you for your existence in our industry, for making the space safe, for creating physical, emotional and professional boundaries so that we can make work about exploitation, loss of respect, about abuse of power without being exploited or abused in the process.

“I know what it is like to shoot without an intimacy director. The messy, embarrassing feeling for the crew. The internal devastation for the actor. Your direction was essential to my show and I believe essential for every production company that wants to make work exploring themes of consent.”

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“I was once asked to define movement. I reflected, if you are alive, you move.
We look for the rise and fall of the breath in the lungs.
Our fundamental dynamo is the heart beat, each one unique.
We inhabit a universe where rhythm is everything, the turning of the earth, the pull of the tides, the progression of the seasons, against which we experience ourselves in the chaos of life!”

Ita O’Brien

The role of an intimacy coordinator is still fairly new in the world of film and TV but one that is fast gaining adoption in production houses including the BBC and Netflix. A pioneer and principal practitioner in the field, Ita O’Brien works to choreograph the complex rhythms of intimate scenes and ensure best practice on set and stage when performances include nudity and sexual content. Ita has worked on productions including Normal People, Sex Education, I May Destroy You, The Dig and It’s a Sin. 

Joining Laura Barton from her home in Kent, Ita speaks about her work, physical rhythm and how she moved from dancing to acting to intimacy.

Listen to the podcast on Toast

New guidelines published by the Time’s Up campaign advise actors to set out their boundaries for scenes involving sex and nudity before they are filmed.

The campaign says a so-called “nudity rider” or “simulated sex waiver” should be in place before filming begins.

Luther actress Ruth Wilson is among those to welcome the initiative.

“Everyone deserves to feel safe at work and these [guidelines] offer a huge step towards that becoming a reality,” the His Dark Materials star said.

Riders are conditions or provisos added to something already agreed, like a contract of employment or a job offer.

Bond actress Naomie Harris also backed guidelines she said would “help arm people with the resources and information needed to determine the best path forward”.

Time’s Up was established in 2018 by members of the entertainment industry including Shonda Rhimes, Natalie Portman and America Ferrera to protest against sexual misconduct in the entertainment industry.

…

Ita O’Brien, founder of Intimacy On Set , said she wanted it to be “standard practice” to have an intimacy coordinator present at auditions.

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BY BECKY BURGUM

In the wake of the #MeToo movement and Hollywood’s continuing reckoning with sexual misconduct, intimacy coordinators have become a fixture on film and television sets. Their role is to ensure the safety, consent and comfort of performers when executing the vision of writers and directors.

And no one has received more attention and credit for doing so than Ita O’Brien, widely considered the original intimacy coordinator.

She spent years developing Intimacy on Set Guidelines, before founding Intimacy On Set, a service that provides intimacy coordinators, consultancy, advocacy and training for TV, film and theatre sets. She was first hired as an official intimacy coordinator on Sex Education season one in 2018 (a show widely praised for its realistic and inclusive portrayals of sex) and has since worked on other hit shows including Normal People, I May Destroy You, Industry and It’s A Sin.

‘I take no credit in the incredible writing that is already in the shows I’ve worked on, but my role is to help facilitate. I make sure the sexual content isn’t gratuitous, that it’s serving the character and storyline,’ says Ita O’Brien over Zoom. ‘I make sure the actors are fully aware on what is being asked of them and I create clear choreography for them to follow, so they feel safe and empowered.’

With the help of better scripts and more female directors, O’Brien is leading the charge ensuring there are more relatable, un-glamorised portrayals of sex on screen which directly transcend to what viewers are home can learn, consider and put into practice in their own lives.

Here she talks to ELLE UK about seven lessons we can learn about our own relationships and sex lives through the overhauling and updating of tiresome, outdated and harmful depictions on TV.

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