Press

Mail Online: 'I'd never done anything like that': Normal People star Daisy Edgar-Jones details the filming of the shows intimate scenes

23/11/2021

The series hired intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien to carefully construct and choreograph the scenes with realistic portrayal.
On Ita's role, Daisy spoke about the vulnerability that actors face and the importance of having intimacy coordinator's on set.
She said: 'I find it very shocking that [intimacy coordinators are] new. You are simulating something, and you are very vulnerable in that moment.
'So, it was amazing working with Ita [O’Brien, Normal People’s intimacy coordinator], she’s really good at allowing you to have agency in those moments.'

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InsideHook: Obviously “Game of Thrones” Should Have Had an Intimacy Coordinator

3/11/2021

In other words, Momoa never would have been pressured to remove his intimacy pouch had there been an intimacy coordinator on set to help guide the scene. But, sadly, the actors on Game of Thrones weren’t the only ones harmed by its problematic sex scenes. Fans who watched the fantasy series — particularly those who were young, sexually inexperienced and impressionable at the time — may have developed their own incorrect or outdated views on what’s considered normal or acceptable when it comes to sex and consent based on what they saw onscreen.

“Very often, how someone learns about intimacy is through what they see,” intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien told InsideHook. “That is the medium through which we’re entertaining ourselves, but also reflecting our humanity back to itself. That’s what people feel that they need to aspire to. When it’s so unrealistic, it forms a real schism in how people think they should be and what they think is normal.”

We obviously can’t go back in time and undo the damage wrought by Game of Thrones‘s lack of an intimacy coordinator, but moving forward, we can work towards making the role an industry standard to ensure that actors like Whelan are never made to feel as though their personal boundaries regarding sex and nudity have been violated at work.

Ten years after the premiere of Thrones, HBO is now using intimacy coordinators on all its productions that have intimate scenes (the move was announced in 2018 after Thrones had finished filming its final season); here’s hoping that in another decade, it’ll be an absolute requirement on all film sets.

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Decider: ‘Foundation’ Star Leah Harvey on Gender-Flips, Action Scenes, and Shipping Salvor and Phara

16/10/2021

Salvor does have a romance. I’m really struck by how in the show, sexuality and intimacy is just romantic. In other shows, it’s for shock value or it’s racy. Every single moment of intimacy felt earned, it felt dreamy and passionate. And in this case, it’s your character’s relationship with Hugo (Daniel McPhearson). Can you talk to me about how Salvor sees that relationship, and how you saw and approached those kissing scenes and more intimate moments with the other actors?

We had an amazing intimacy coach, Ita O’Brien, and some of the people that worked with her worked with us, and she made those scenes very, very easy and comfortable, and I think that we ended up with the best result. But yeah, I think that they are beautiful, and I think that it shows what Salvor’s fighting for, actually. When you get to see the connection she has with Hugo and her parents and just anyone, because, you know, a hug is intimate. A kiss on the cheek is intimate. It shows what we’re all fighting for, and that’s why I think it’s so earned and it’s so beautifully put in the show. It’s humanity, and it’s wonderful to be able to do that, to show that.

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The Times: BBC makes sex scene co-ordinators mandatory

15/10/2021

Ita O’Brien worked as an intimacy coach on Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You

The BBC has made intimacy co-ordinators mandatory for all its television programmes after actors including Michaela Coel said they were essential to filming sex scenes safely.

Charlotte Moore, the BBC’s director of television, has told external production companies that co-ordinators “must be engaged” when filming scenes of an intimate nature.

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Stylist: Jodie Comer exclusive: “The Last Duel holds a mirror up to society”

15/10/2021

The rape scene is particularly traumatic. How did you approach filming that?

We had an amazing intimacy coordinator called Ita O’Brien and she’s worked on Sex Education, I May Destroy You and I Hate Suzie; so many incredible things that have tackled really difficult subjects. We were so lucky to have her on board, and so it was having conversations with her about what I was comfortable with, what I wasn’t. The night before shooting those scenes, Adam and I went to set with Ridley and blocked out the physicality of it. Then the next day me and Adam had a conversation and said: if there’s anything that either of us aren’t comfortable with, we’ll let each other know. But we had a respect for each other and trust in one another and we both felt very safe.

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Grazia: Interview with Jodie Comer on The Last Duel

14/10/2021

HotPress: Interview: Sex Education stars on the return of the acclaimed Netflix series

6/10/2021

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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The Jakarta Post: Ita O'Brien: in-demand on-screen intimacy coordinator

31/7/2021

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.

"This is a process by which we bring our professional structure to intimacy" allowing the on-screen stars to "bring all of the skills of the actor to this moment," she added.

"We agree on a consent of touch and then a clear process by which we choreograph the intimate contact clearly. So it's just like dance."

Each scene will be discussed then rehearsed beforehand, away from the glare of the dozens of people usually present on a set.

"When the camera rolls or they're up on stage, they know that they can perform that intimate contact, knowing where they're going to be touched," she said.

At the heart of her philosophy is consent, in an industry which has been rocked in recent years by sexual assault claims.

Her motto, which she says she often repeats to actors, is "your 'no' is a gift. Tell us your 'no', so that we can trust your 'yes'".

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Collider: Emily Mortimer on Directing 'The Pursuit of Love's Sex Scenes and Assembling a "Super Band" For the Show With a Bad Seed's Help

30/7/2021

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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The Guardian: Top intimacy coach says too many TV bosses still do not value role

8/6/2021

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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