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The 53-year-old director enlisted Ita O’Brien to choreograph raunchy parts of the BBC One drama to ensure stars Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal – who play love-struck Marianne and Connell – looked comfortable with each other on screen.

Lenny said: “The way you are able to portray [the sex] in a positive way, for everyone involved, is to make the actors feel empowered and safe and invested in what is happening.

“Ita O’Brien, our intimacy co-ordinator, was amazing. She is somebody who helps productions negotiate what can be tricky territory for actors, directors, producers and film makers.”

Ita has previously worked with the stars of ‘Sex Education’ and BBC One drama ‘Gentleman Jack’, and helped the actors and crew “negotiate consent” by allowing everyone to talk openly about the vulnerable scenes.

Lenny added: “Having Ita involved allowed us to talk so freely about what people felt comfortable with, how they would negotiate consent in the context of the simulation that you’re doing on set, the best way to shoot it, and how to choreograph it in a way that makes people feel empowered and not uncomfortable.

“And of course how to protect everybody involved.”

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Some of the strongest and most memorable moments from the book are the intimate and complex sex scenes between Marianne and Connell, which are described so wonderfully by Rooney. 

Abrahamson and the lead actors have taken what’s at the heart of those sex scenes and made them feel even more intimate on screen. That is partly thanks to the show’s on-set intimacy director, as the team hired Ita O’Brien – the same intimacy coach who worked on Netflix’s Sex Education.

Both of the lead actors in Normal People are relatively young – Daisy is 21, and Paul is 24 – with little to no experience of filming sex on screen, but it does feature prominently in the book.

Showing how much the filming industry has changed over the years, Daisy and Paul both now feel very strongly that they wouldn’t feel comfortable working without an intimacy director on future projects that involve filming sex scenes.

‘I love that scene, I think it’s one of my favourites,’ Daisy says. ‘It’s beyond accurate, when you both know exactly why you’re there, but you’re going, “When do we get to the bit when we…” The bit where he was taking her bra off, it just happened to be the most awkward bra ever to remove and my arms were stuck. It was a moment for Paul and I to laugh, and it’s normally meant to be perfect and gorgeous on screen, but the directors said play into all that stuff. And we had a wonderful intimacy coordinator; it’s a stunt, which means it takes you personally away from it, it’s just about the choreography.’

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Over the last couple of years, since the #MeToo movement revealed extensive exploitation and abuse in the entertainment industry, there has been new focus on what is demanded of actors and actresses on set, especially when male directors and producers are involved (Hettie Macdonald directed the latter six episodes.)

So the production turned to a professional increasingly sought after in the entertainment industry: an intimacy coordinator. Ita O’Brien, the “Normal People” coordinator, sees her work as bringing the same professionalism to sex scenes that you have at other stages of a shoot, to keep actors from being coerced or left to work out the choreography themselves. She speaks with the director and actors one-on-one, hearing their concerns and establishing the scene’s shape, so there are no surprises when everyone is on set.

O’Brien’s work may have been especially valuable given Rooney’s approach to writing intimate moments. In the book, she grounds sex in sensation and the context of a character’s emotional life, rather than description. She also co-wrote the first six episodes of the show with Alice Birch, and described the sex scenes as “probably less ‘written’ than other parts of the script.” She wanted to leave room for Abrahamson, Edgar-Jones and Mescal to decide what worked best for them, she said.

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The female star of a new BBC drama has hailed its nudity gender equality, with both lead characters filming scenes fully naked.

Daisy Edgar-Jones said that having an intimacy coach on set while filming sex scenes for Normal People, a BBC Three adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel, made them a “a joy” to shoot.

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Normal People star Daisy Edgar-Jones has said having an intimacy coach on set during the BBC Three adaptation’s sex scenes made them “a joy” to film.

The 12-part series, based on Sally Rooney’s book, stars Cold Feet actress Edgar-Jones, 21, as Marianne and Paul Mescal, 24, in his first television role as Connell.

It follows their relationship from the end of their school days in a small town in the west of Ireland to their undergraduate years at Trinity College.

Describing intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, Edgar-Jones told the Guardian: “She’s brilliant. The sex scenes were a joy to us because it was her job to worry about how it would work and we just turned up, did the choreography and carried on. We just had to think about the emotional beats.

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But the representation of those love stories is inevitably different in a novel, which deals in words, and on film, where articulacy lies in the manipulation of the human body. “The sex was a big challenge and we took it really seriously from the beginning,” says Abrahamson. “What we would aim to show, but also literally how we would do the sex in a way that was positive, safe and healthy for everyone involved both in front of and behind the camera.”

Not least of the challenges was the issue of asymmetry – of both gender and status – which has cast such a shadow over the media world in the era of #MeToo. The theatre, film and TV director Hettie Macdonald is responsible for six of the episodes. “I wanted to make it a more gender-balanced crew right from the start,” says Abrahamson. “It’s often the case that crews are very male-dominated, especially in the camera department, and I’m beginning to see that there’s less and less reason for that.”

“But here’s the biggest thing for me,”he adds. “I’m in my 50s and as far as the young actors are concerned, I’m successful. My worry would be – because I’m squeamish about ever doing anything uncomfortable for them – that they would feel under pressure to do what I wanted, and my fear of that would stop me from asking.”

The breakthrough was the decision to hire the services of “intimacy co-ordinator” Ita O’Brien. “I was anxious to start with because I thought the most subtle and important moments would be between me and the actors,” admits Abrahamson. “But what’s brilliant is that she would come in and talk to the whole crew and production about simple things like not using euphemisms, about getting explicit consent every time you’re about to do something and finding a language to talk about lovemaking, and the shapes and moods of it, that is empowering for the people involved.”

“She’s the go-to,” agrees Mescal. “She’s brilliant,” says Edgar-Jones. “The sex scenes were a joy to us because it was her job to worry about how it would work and we just turned up, did the choreography and carried on. We just had to think about the emotional beats.”

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One thing that helped, he tells me, is the fact that they had on-set intimacy coordinators to work with. Ita O’Brien and David Thackeray have advised on British shows such as Gentleman Jack and Electric Dreams and were available to discuss any worries that the cast might have with the sex scenes they were asked to act out, ranging from the sensuous – Swindells’s detention-time romp with Eric (played by Ncuti Gatwa) – to the horrifying – Wood’s character is traumatised by a stranger who ejaculates on her on a bus.

Butterfield didn’t need the intimacy coordinators himself much, but he was aware that others found their presence hugely helpful. “I didn’t have so many intimate scenes,” he says, “and for a lot of the intimate scenes I did have I was by myself and I felt like I didn’t need a 40-year-old woman to guide me through that.” He laughs. “I thought I could probably manage on my own.

“Quite a few of the other actors, this was their first job, and to have someone who you know you can talk to if you have any concerns was great. And the atmosphere on set was actually really great. The directors and producers were so respectful. We always knew where our boundaries lay, knew that we could say no. No one ever went home feeling that they had done something they didn’t want to do.”

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Intimacy Coordinator Ita O’Brien speaks to John Beattie about ageism for women in the industry, and how Intimacy Coordinators are helping to create healthier, more exciting, more nuanced intimate content on our screens.