News & Press: Press

By Siobhan Hegarty

In the last few years, high-profile actors, including GoT’s Emilia Clarke and Frida star Salma Hayek, have said they were pressured (in Clarke’s situation) or threatened (in Hayek’s) to expose their bodies and partake in gratuitous simulated sex scenes.

And this doesn’t just affect the actors involved. It can warp audience’s perspectives of the realities of sex and consent.

That’s something intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien is fighting to change. “With the intimate content, it’s your personal and private body that’s at play,” she points out.

“An injury can go from purely physical, to emotional and psychological — when someone’s body has been handled and touched in a way that is not suitable for that person and is not within their agreement and consent.”

O’Brien likens her role to a stunt coordinator — only she applies choreography and a consent-based framework to sexual content and nudity, rather than action sequences.

Some of her most recent work can be seen on Normal People, the BBC and Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s 2018 book of the same name, which focusses on a teen romance in Ireland. (And involves quite a bit of sex.)

“There’s a scene in episode two, the first time making love, and for Marianne it’s her experience of losing her virginity. That scene took all day, so I’m not saying that by choreographing a scene you’re not going to make it exhausting.

“But the intimacy coordination work is about everybody being in agreement and consent … and absolutely every detail serving character, serving storytelling.”

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BY AMY KAUFMAN

“Normal People” isn’t about sex. It’s a quiet relationship drama that follows two Irish teenagers, Marianne and Connell, as they fall in and out of love over the course of their high school and collegiate years. But their intimacy is an integral part of the romance, and the way it’s depicted on screen is far more vulnerable and unhurried than in most Hollywood productions. Yes, there’s full-frontal nudity, but more impactful are the prolonged stares, breathy kisses and subtle skin grazes loaded with meaning.

So how do you make sex scenes between two total strangers — who swear, just like post-”A Star Is Born” Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, that they’ve never dated — look so real?

Hiring an intimacy coordinator, for starters. Lenny Abrahamson, who executive produced the series and also directed its first six episodes, admits he was initially hesitant when the idea was floated. He didn’t want Ita O’Brien — who has also coached actors on Netflix’s “Sex Education” and HBO’s “Gentleman Jack” — to come between him and the cast.

BY ANGELA LAW

The UK has produced two standout TV series in recent months: Sex Education (Netflix) and Normal People (BBC). Both follow a cast of teenagers as they navigate the many ups and downs of adulthood, and you would think that’s where the similarities end. While Sex Education uses tongue-in-cheek humour to tackle heavier issues like sexuality and gender binaries, Normal People depicts first love and mental health in a quieter way, where the power is felt fully in long stares and things left unsaid. But when I sat down to watch Normal People, the intimate sex scenes reminded me of Sex Education a lot, even though they are worlds apart in terms of their tone and pace.

Both shows deliver raw and honest depictions of sex across a spectrum of sexualities and desires, so naturally, it was a hot topic at the round-table interviews I attended for both series. When questioned about what it was like to film the huge number of sex scenes, there’s one person that both shows’ cast and crew credit for the believability: Ita O’Brien. An intimacy coordinator with a background in dancing, acting, and movement coaching, O’Brien has developed a set of guidelines to protect actors while filming sex scenes, and to ensure that networks are producing great intimate content. In both cases, the young actors said filming scenes under O’Brien’s guidance was empowering — after a long day of filming, they felt confident and like they’d completed an honest day’s work, despite the vulnerable positions the scenes put them in.

On the day that O’Brien and I caught up (in our respective homes during the UK’s novel coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown), it was the day before her daughter’s birthday. She started the interview by telling me all about the cake she planned to bake that evening, and what began as a scheduled 20-minute conversation evolved into almost two hours of chatting. Pretty quickly, it was obvious why O’Brien has been so successful in her business, pairing her extensive experience in the creative arts with her warm and empathetic personality. She is my favourite kind of person: a ballsy woman who’s tough but undoubtedly kind. We spoke at length about the film industry and how it has historically approached intimate content, how it’s evolved since the birth of Time’s Up in early 2018, and exactly what it means to be an intimacy coordinator on set.

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BY MICHELLE RUIZ

It was never a question for Lenny Abrahamson, who directed Normal People along with Hettie Macdonald, that in order to truly capture the novel, the onscreen sex would have to feel intensely realistic. “You can’t suddenly become coy and prim about the human body,” Abrahamson told Vogue. “You need it to feel like when they went from talking into making love, that the conversation hadn’t ended.”

But executing that erotic vision and navigating nudity with two young actors (Edgar-Jones is 21 and Mescal is 24) in their first major roles in a much-anticipated adaptation—and in an industry scarred by serial predators like Harvey Weinstein—meant Abrahamson approached sex scenes with a meticulous level of care. Moments like Marianne losing her virginity to Connell in his cramped bedroom or the couple fervently reuniting in her Dublin apartment may look completely natural, but were discussed and planned at length by Abrahamson, Edgar-Jones, Mescal, and intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien to ensure the actors were comfortable and consenting.

“If you go back a decade or more, it was all about the contract,” Abrahamson said of past nudity clauses established upfront, locking actors (often actresses) in before filming even started. But with the dawn of #MeToo exposing the sexual abuse and harassment endemic to Hollywood, Normal People is part of pioneering a new way to treat the sex scene.

By ROWENA HENLEY

As an intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien is well versed in the art of sex as storytelling. As she explains via Zoom a few days after Normal People has landed on iPlayer, it’s her job to make sure the details provided by the writer and director are “honoured” in every intimate scene. Rather than rush through moments of sex or nudity for fear of embarrassment, O’Brien encourages actors and directors to take their time, to consider each touch, each subtle shift in tone, and to ask themselves how these moments can add to the narrative they’ve created elsewhere.

As well as offering creative support, intimacy coordinators provide practical guidance – they ensure the actors’ boundaries are respected. O’Brien begins each day by speaking to the director and actors about “agreement and consent.”

“We do that every single day because everybody is different every single day,” she tells me. “Even if [the actors have] worked with each other before, I always check in.” Although other aspects of her work will differ from project to project, the discussion around consent always comes first, O’Brien explains. It is the principle upon which her Intimacy on Set guidelines – the first of their kind in the UK – were built.

After this discussion, “I usually have the actors stand in close proximity, and have a hug,” O’Brien says. “That kind of icebreaker makes such a difference. People will instinctively always stand where it’s socially OK – they won’t break that. That’s where, as the intimacy coordinator, I’m very consciously bringing them closer together.” But where do they go from there?

I asked O’Brien to talk me through three intimate scenes she helped choreograph for Normal People. Below, she offers rare, behind-the-scenes insight into the sex scenes that absolutely everyone is talking (and thinking) about right now.

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By Rachel Handler

O’Brien kicked off the process of structuring the show’s intimate scenes quite early on. As the actors remember it, they’d only known each other for three or four days when O’Brien asked them to participate in an ice-breaking movement workshop. Mescal, 24, and Edgar-Jones, 21, remember the workshops as slightly mortifying. “We had to do a physical warm-up where we would inhabit animals, which is incredibly useful for the work, but my embarrassment threshold is quite low,” says Mescal. “I’m doing this in front of somebody who I was going to be working with for the next five months. I didn’t want Daisy to judge me or think that I was borderline insane.” Edgar-Jones laughs. “I was bent over because I was trying not to look at you.”

But both agree that the warm-ups were essential for creating a lighter mood and a deep sense of mutual trust that they kept up over the months of shooting. “Filming [sex scenes], you have to be able to have a giggle because it’s a strange situation to be in. You’re friends with all the crew. We’re all having lunch together. So you have to be able to laugh. And Ita just created an environment that was pressure-free,” Edgar-Jones says.

When considering what the sex scenes might look like, O’Brien took her initial cues from Rooney, who co-wrote the script with playwrights Alice Birch and Mark O’Rowe. “There was such a clear charting of the progression of their intimacy, and also the quality of the intimacy, both in the scenes with Marianne and Connell, and then the scenes with the other people they had sex with,” she says. Sometimes the script’s stage directions would be explicit, but sometimes they’d be more vague, something like, “They make love.” In those murkier cases, O’Brien would sit down and discuss the scenes with Abrahamson, Macdonald, Edgar-Jones, and Mescal to find the answer to an essential question: “What shape might this lovemaking take?”

In the scene – in which Marianne has sex for the first time – Connell puts on a condom and reiterates to Marianne that they can stop at any time.

He says: “If you want to stop or anything, we can obviously stop… If it hurts, or, anything, we can stop, it won’t be awkward. You can just say.”

After watching the scene – ideally not with their parents – people flocked to social media to shower praise on it:
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Much of the credit for this depiction must go to Ita O’Brien, an intimacy coordinator who also worked on Netflix’s hit comedy-drama Sex Education.

Speaking to LADbible about O’Brien’s role, Sex Education director Ben Taylor said: “The way she explained it is that if you have a fight scene on a show you have a fight coordinator, and if you have a dance scene in a show you have a choreographer, and why do we not approach intimacy scenes like that?

“That’s the role that she and her team fulfil, which they are there to help you do it really well, help you do it really safely and they take care of the cast and the crew before, during and after those scenes and hopefully take away some of the fear and anxiety that can come up around shooting sex scenes.”

Note: this article is no longer available on the original link: worldnewsnetwork.co.in/people-are-praising-a-sex-scene-in-bbc-drama-normal-people-ladbible/

By Lea Palmieri

​Helping them navigate the many intense scenes, especially for Mescal, a theater actor who finds himself in his first major TV role, was Ita O’Brien, an intimacy coordinator responsible for being a liaison between the actors and crew in order to make those ever-awkward sex scenes just a little less uncomfortable for everyone involved. “She’s definitely at the forefront of that as a functioning member of the filming community,” Mescal told me before describing what the process of working with her was like. “We rehearsed with Ita prior to filming so that we knew the structure when it came to working on set. At the start of the day when we’d be doing sex scenes, we would sit down with her and Lenny and just discuss the scene. Emotionally was a really important thing to Ita, so the center of the scene was the emotional intimacy between them. Then the physical act of the scene, what was physically happening between Connell and Marianne. Then we would block the scene and shoot it and all the while it was about Ita and Lenny and Hettie being attentive to what me and Daisy felt comfortable with. Ultimately I think that liberates us as actors, that we don’t feel self-conscious, we’ve discussed it and we feel safe and comfortable, and I think it allows the scenes to be quite powerful and moving.”

By Isabel Jones

Obviously, there’s a lot of sex and nudity in the show, which I know you’ve spoken to a bit. But what was the process of working on those scenes with Paul and an intimacy coordinator like?

Well, we had [intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien], who’s an amazing person. She was the sort of forerunner of that job, of an intimacy coach, and she worked in sex education and stuff like that. And it was great having her, because she took the pressure off of us when it came to those scenes. Because you are a little trepidatious going into it. You know?

I hadn’t really done anything like that before, so it’s something you want to feel is well-handled, and it really was. She just created an environment that was incredibly safe, and it just meant that all Paul and I had to worry about was the acting of it. And they are very important scenes to the book. What I love about them is they’re always carrying on a kind of story beat, they’re always furthering on a narrative, and they’re never just for the sake of it. And it was important to do them justice. And yeah, Ita just created an environment which meant that we could do that and we felt safe in it, which was so brilliant.

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By Libby Torres

Speaking to Insider via Zoom, O’Brien said that choreographing sex successfully is less about chemistry or the intrapersonal relationship between actors, and more about maintaining boundaries and an open line of communication between all parties, including the director.

She also stressed the power of a “positive no,” wherein an actor can express their physical boundaries without fear of repercussions, and the importance of “agreement and consent.” And for the intimacy coordinator, taking the character’s sexuality, not the actor’s, into consideration is key. 

“It’s not as if you have dialogue and then suddenly — now they’re there, they’re making love,” O’Brien said. “All of it is just a continuation of the communication between characters, be it in the text or in physical dance.”

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