News & Press: Press

By Tanya Sweeney

Even before #MeToo brought some of these stories to light, movement director Ita O’Brien had been creating an on-set intimacy guide. After working with actors on movement workshops, she noted that many of them felt vulnerable, unsure and compromised while filming sex scenes.

After working on her own project exploring the dynamic of sexual abuse, entitled Does My Sex Offend You? she realised that something had to change.

“I started my project in 2015 and was looking at how do we keep actors safe and what practices needed to be put in place,” she reveals. “When the Weinstein thing happened [as a number of women came forward to highlight instances of harassment at the hands of movie producer Harvey Weinstein], I was ready to say to directors, ‘here are the guidelines. This will give you a professional structure in order to do intimate content in a professional way’.”

With directors and producers keen on fostering a safer workspace, O’Brien soon found herself hired as an on-set intimacy co-ordinator. After “choreographing” the sex scenes on Gentleman Jack, Watchmen and Netflix’s Sex Education, O’Brien recently worked on Normal People, the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel, along with director Lenny Abrahamson.

“I can’t imagine doing things like that without Ita,” its star Edgar-Jones recently said. “There was a sense with Ita in charge of the physical stuff, that all we had to worry about were the story beats, and doing the writing justice. Then, it becomes like a job. You’re such good friends with the crew that you do a scene like that, then you break for lunch. It’s a bit odd.”

With a mum from Cookstown in Co Tyrone and a dad from Clonmel in Co Tipperary, O’Brien laughs when I ask about how a nice Catholic girl like herself has wound up on film sets, essentially showing actors how to simulate sex.

Yet she takes her work very seriously, and is passionate about getting the scenes right. O’Brien likens her work, in a way, to that of a stunt co-ordinator, or dance choreographer. Her job is to serve the director’s vision, while also advocating for the welfare of the actors involved in the scenes.

“You wouldn’t say the stunt co-ordinator is there to make the actors safe – you would say the stunt co-ordinator is there to give you really exciting, convincing, full-on fight scenes that will have people on the edge of their seats,” O’Brien explains. “You’re putting in techniques that keep your actors safe, which will let them act their socks off and create the best intimate content that they can.”

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Deadline: Paul Mescal, Daisy Edgar-Jones & Lenny Abrahamson On The Magic Of Smash Hit ‘Normal People’ & Season 2: “I Need Them To Be Together”

By Antonia Blyth

​Guiney and Abrahamson also knew that the intense, very intimate scenes were key, and they were aware of the need to protect everybody involved. So, an intimacy coordinator was brought in. “We had this wonderful person,” Guiney says. “A woman called Ita O’Brien, who, with Lenny and Daisy and Paul, and with the DP Suzi Lavelle, worked very closely together to create an atmosphere so that the actors could actually cease to worry about the choreography of those scenes, and could actually act. Because we had such young actors, we just wanted to make sure that they were as comfortable and as protected as possible, had as much agency in how those scenes were done and didn’t feel any pressure. Ita just creates a very—to use that well-worn phrase—safe space. But it is a really safe space where really good work can happen.”

“I wouldn’t ever sign on to a job now where sex is required without an intimacy coordinator,” Mescal says, “because I can’t imagine how you would do it.”

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ESQ: What does the process of working with an intimacy coordinator look like?

PE: I honestly cannot imagine a world where you do scenes that demand this level of intimacy without an intimacy coordinator. To me, it’s insane. You would never film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon without someone on set whose job it is to make sure you don’t cut someone’s head off. I think intimacy coordinators are crucial in that same way. Ita O’Brien was our intimacy coordinator; we had some sessions with her long before we started filming. Those sessions were all about us being clear with what we were comfortable doing and what we weren’t comfortable doing. We talked about how we could navigate our individual safe zones emotionally, mentally, and physically in order to create a scene that does justice to what’s written on the page. Ita is all about empowering, safeguarding, and liberating performers. It felt like a liberated, freeing environment to do what is on the surface a very demanding task for an actor.

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By Rosie Humphrey

Working behind the scenes on achieving this realism is Ita O’Brien, an intimacy co-ordinator who recently worked on the similarly-acclaimed Normal People. Over Zoom she broke down what made the scene so very powerful and disruptive. “When you look for intimate scenes that feature menstruation, I haven’t found any where you can actually see the journey through to intercourse, with all the paraphernalia, the pads, the tampons and the clot being acted out,” Ita says. “I have to thank Michaela for writing this for all the women in the world. What I love about the scene is that it’s not a big deal. She mentions it, it’s not sensationalised, it’s not horrific. In fact, the character of Biagio, his curiosity and interest is just so ground-breaking.”

The scene was not just groundbreaking or educational for audiences either. “In my preparation with Marouane, who plays Biago, he was asking ‘really, really does this happen?’, and we were having a laugh about it”, says Ita. “I said to Marouane, who is just the most beautiful soul, the madness is that half of the population in the world spend on average 40 years of their lives menstruating. That’s roughly 480 weeks in the lives of every person who menstruates and of course, that’s going to include our love-making and our sexual expression within some of those 480 weeks — and when have we seen that on screen?”

Ita’s right. With options ranging from the scene in Superbad, which shows Jonah Hill’s character repeatedly gagging after finding period blood on his trousers, to the “heavy flow and a wide-set vagina” classic in Mean Girls, relatable period-sex content is hard to come by. This is why, as Ita explains, “it was very clearly written that, as the pants are coming off, Michaela wanted the pad to be seen. And then, as she’s sat on the toilet, she’s seen putting the pad in [her pants], so again all of that paraphernalia that women go through is written as part of the fabric of Arabella’s everyday life and then in her intimate content. That is so important.”

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By Monica Castillo

Since the show focuses on issues around consent, what was it like preparing for intimate scenes on set? Were there intimacy coordinators involved?

I prefer not to act out sexual scenes, so I had a body double in that scene — a very great body double, because some people think it was me. So I certainly didn’t act out any of that, but there was an intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien, and she was really great. It was a very respectful environment. Only the people involved were there. Though I wasn’t allowed in the room at that time, I did get to know what was going on. I was told what was going to go on, as it was my character who was going to be portrayed. It was a very comfortable and safe space.

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The actor, 30, said he had been stripping off on screen for a long time, including, aged 17, in Channel 4 drama Skins.

Having an intimacy coordinator oversee sex scenes on The Great, a new TV miniseries about Catherine The Great, was a refreshing development, he said.

“This is the first job I’ve had that on and it’s a very positive change in the industry. It’s almost like having a stunt coordinator,” Hoult told GQ Hype.

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BY LESLEY GOLDBERG

Sex Education was the first Netflix show to use an intimacy coordinator (Ita O’Brien). How did that help you play out scenes in which Otis becomes more comfortable with masturbation and his girlfriend, Ola (Patricia Allison)?

It was helpful to have someone to talk to if you don’t feel comfortable or if you don’t necessarily want to bring something up or you’re embarrassed. A lot of my scenes were me, by myself. For my five-minute masturbating scene, I didn’t actually feel like I needed to work with her because I had a good idea of how that might play out. (Laughs.) But for scenes with Patricia — we met at the end of season one, but we didn’t know each other before then — Ita helped us find our boundaries.

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By Natalie Jarvey

​Nailing those scenes was crucial given how much Marianne and Connell’s relationship is grounded in sex. To create the right environment, production brought in intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien. Once both actors were comfortable, Abrahamson says he tried to shoot the sex scenes like he would any other scene. “If anything, what’s radical about Normal People is that they move from conversation to lovemaking in a way which doesn’t involve a split stylistically,” he says. “I’m primarily interested in their faces. I’m primarily interested in tracking their emotions.”

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By Craig Simpson

Rogue sex scene experts on film and television sets threaten the progress of the #MeToo campaign, the intimacy coordinator for BBC series Normal People has warned. 

Ita O’Brien, who also choreographed intimate scenes for Gentleman Jack and Sex Education, prevents actors crossing personal boundaries and ensures they do not feel victimised by their co stars.

She believes romantic scenes should be treated “like a stunt of a fight” and is training a generation of sexual stunt workers to ensure performers can act without inhibition or exploitation.

Ms O’Brien noticed a rise in dubious practitioners on sets encouraging actors to take part in scenes without appropriate consent and warns it will ruin progress made by the #MeToo movement.

“People have jumped on the bandwagon,” Ms O’Brien told The Telegraph.

“I’ve had people that started training with me who then felt ‘I know what I’m doing’ and set themselves up as fully accredited.