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Metro: Pioneering intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien on being an industry trailblazer in the wake of #MeToo: ‘I didn’t jump on a bandwagon’

23/10/2022

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By Tori Brazier

Ita O’Brien has been working in the theatre, TV and film industry for almost 40 years – first as a dancer and actor before training as a movement director. However, it is her role as an intimacy coordinator that has seen her feted by actors and pushed to the forefront of a global conversation following the birth of the #MeToo movement five years ago this month.

She is one of the most positive consequences in Hollywood of the downfall of disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein in October 2017, since sentenced to 23 years in jail for his sex crimes against women in the industry.

With the formation of the Time’s Up organisation in response to #MeToo in January 2018, productions started realising more formal processes were needed to protect both crew members and performers in the workplace.

O’Brien – herself invited to join the Time’s Up UK women’s committee during its first month – seemed the perfect answer: her previously self-developed intimacy rehearsal protocols for sex scenes had already been warmly received by both Mountview drama school in 2015, and actors’ union Equity and the Personal Managers’ Association (the UK’s leading professional body for talent agencies and actors’ usual sole advocates) in the first half of 2017.

And all before any hint of Weinstein’s misconduct openly surfaced.

From Sex Education to It’s a Sin, and Normal People to I May Destroy You, most of the sex scenes that have caught viewers’ imaginations and fired up conversations on social media in recent years have been O’Brien’s work.

While an intimacy coordinator’s role is reasonably self-explanatory as both an advocate for the actors and an aid in realising the director’s vision for any intimate content in a safe but creatively satisfying way (see credits above), there are also a fair few misconceptions floating around.

‘We are not sex experts. We are not sex therapists or couples’ therapists, that is what we are not!’ O’Brien tells Metro.co.uk, laughing at the misapprehensions people often have.

‘What we are experts at is supporting the actor-director process. And we’re experts in choreography, body knowledge and anatomy, and in supporting that choreography telling the right character story. I am not an expert in sexual content at all – that’s what I will research. I’ve got my books. When I did Gentleman Jack, I had to go and research. When I did It’s a Sin, I talked to people from that community, as any actor would with any subjects that they’re asked to do.’

In O’Brien’s eyes, the intimacy coordinator fulfills a role on set that is as vital as that of a stunt coordinator or choreographer – both experts in certain types of movement, and neither saddled with the assumption that they are purely there as some sort of overzealous health and safety monitor.

She points out that people recognise those roles are there to make ‘exciting’ content, and it’s exactly the same for an intimacy coordinator, who also bears in mind an actor’s personal requirements and follows ‘a professional process’. A director also wouldn’t assume they could film a fight or dance scene without an expert on hand.

‘But the idea [with intimate content had been] we’re all sexual beings, so do we need a practitioner?’ adds O’Brien.

As a movement specialist since 2007, O’Brien had the right mindset to understand how the role of an intimacy coordinator was both sorely needed and where it could be slotted into the creative process of a production.

She had also recognised the dangers of continuing to ignore the vulnerability of actors and crew members expected to film and edit sex scenes without proper structure and guidance under the old adage of ‘just go for it’.

‘That was a statement that used to happen before Weinstein: If you’re an actor, that’s your job. You’re expected to be naked, you’re expected to perform sexual content. And if you’re a good actor, that’s what you’ll do.’

O’Brien is also very aware of the consequences of the pressures of an unguided intimate scene on its actors.

‘Asking them to explore any degree of simulated sexual content or degrees of their nakedness and degrees of touch, when it’s not done well, without agreement and consent, then injury can be physical – but it also can be emotional and psychological. And that injury actually has way more far-reaching effects than perhaps hurting an ankle.’

Taking it back to Me Too and Time’s Up, she adds: ‘And that’s the shift: while actors were speaking about how awkward intimate scenes were to do, the seriousness and the impact of that awkwardness actually being an injury wasn’t really taken into account. And that’s the difference with the women bravely speaking up about the Weinstein allegations. As Oprah Winfrey said at the Golden Globes that year, you are being listened to and heard. And then the industry was saying we cannot turn a blind eye any longer to predatory behaviour, we have to do better. And in that intention, then codes of conduct being drawn up – that was the difference, that was a turning point.’

As the UK’s first intimacy coordinator and one of the global leading experts, O’Brien is still taken aback at the ‘amazing coincidence’ of her developing her practice in her own work in the years before the industry’s watershed moment in 2017.

‘If you talk about your life being guided, all those different things that have brought me to this point, the fact that I happened to have been working on it, the fact that Meredith Dufton happened to ask me to come in and start teaching it [at Mountview] – all of those things just were put in place – and that I happened to have already shared the work [with agents] in June of 2017.’

O’Brien was accused by some of ‘jumping on a bandwagon’ with her work, who weren’t aware of the years of ongoing development.

‘That’s why I think what I was sharing had the impact, because it was underpinned by all of my years of a career,’ she explains, ahead of marking 40 years in the industry next year.

She labels Sex Education’s release as one of the first major breakthroughs with getting the role of intimacy coordinator more accepted and appreciated in its different facets – and more understood.

‘In 2019 when Sex Education came out, the world was seeing the honesty that could come from the intimate content. And the actors being able to talk about not just the exciting and ground-breaking intimate content, but how it was created. That was the beginning of the industry beginning to understand the positive, [and] that’s a win-win all around.’

Despite this, she does reveal that it has not been the easiest road to industry-wide acceptance, but she has been lucky enough to have had prominent support along the way.

Double Bafta TV award winner Michaela Coel dedicated her second gong for her ground-breaking show I May Destroy You at the 2021 ceremony – for her acting – to intimacy directors and gave a shoutout to O’Brien specifically. She thanked her intimacy coordinator ‘for making the space safe for creating physical, emotional and professional boundaries so that we can make work about exploitation, loss of respect and about abuse of power without being exploited or abused in the process’.

O’Brien was, understandably, very touched by Coel’s public callout, and acknowledges that it has ‘gone a long way in the industry’, for which she is ‘utterly grateful’.

However, she also reveals initial difficulties she faced with less invested producers and directors as the popularity of her role mushroomed in the immediate fallout after Weinstein – they wanted to be able to say they had hired her as an intimacy coordinator, but weren’t interested in following the process properly.

‘What was happening is that I was asked to come work on productions where it was just box-ticking, and actually nobody on the floor really wanted it. And I had a period when I was walking away from set and I’d come home and say, “I can’t keep doing this”. Because I was basically getting the pushback and the expectation that the actor would have got, and it was really, really, really challenging.’

Then came the unexpected saviour of lockdown in March 2020, where the public were confined to their homes and limited in social activities, leading to an increased focus on television, just when Normal People, I May Destroy You and It’s a Sin all hit our screens, again with O’Brien’s name attached.

She remembers the further impact those shows had on the industry and audiences alike as they tuned in.

‘The industry has been a lot more open to really continuing to work on it,’ O’Brien shares of now.

With her success in such a delicate role though, O’Brien understood pretty quickly that as a new – and as yet, unregulated – job, the position was open to potential abuse. As a professional that shares her self-developed guidelines, and was doing so on Zoom during Covid, she’s had to stamp down on people attempting to use her name in a pretence at official intimacy coordinator ‘training’ – which she does offer – in order to land a job with major networks.

Now she gets attendees to sign to acknowledge that these sessions are not formal training because she knows just how ‘dangerous’ it is when fake practitioners declare themselves intimacy coordinators, which she says can often leave actors working with them ‘traumatised’.

One of her (proudly) acknowledged official trainees though has been making headlines with her work on HBO smash-hit series House of the Dragon, the hotly anticipated prequel to Game of Thrones.

‘Most recently in the press has been one of my fully trained intimacy practitioners, Miriam Lucia. She was one of the practitioners who was with me right from the get-go. And she’s been the practitioner on House of the Dragon, one of the fully trained and accredited intimacy on-set practitioners on the show, and it’s been fantastic to see her work acclaimed!’

As with actors struggling to watch to watch themselves in something, is it difficult for O’Brien to watch sex scenes in other shows and films without analysing the work of colleagues or dwelling on a lack of intimacy coordinator if it’s something older?

‘It works both ways, actually. Sometimes I watch it and go, “Oh, yeah, they could have done with someone who was on that.” And sometimes I go, “Oh, that was so good. Who did that?”’

Generous with her praise, she immediately names two shows that have wowed her: Perry Mason for how ‘raw and messy’ it is, and Lovecraft County for its ‘exciting’ incorporation of magical realism.

As someone who has been in high demand in recent years, O’Brien had two major new films debut at London Film Festival earlier this month, a new adaptation of DH Lawrence’s famously steamy novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, starring Emma Corrin and Jack O’Connell, and Sam Mendes’ latest release, Empire of Light, with Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward, Toby Jones and Colin Firth.

Taking in her new and current projects, as well as the gratitude she feels for her Gentleman Jack writer and director Sally Wainwright and Sex Education producers Ben Taylor and John Jennings all fully embracing her developing best practice for the first time on TV, O’Brien beams broadly.

‘I feel I have to pinch myself. I’m humbled and I feel so lucky to be able to work with these amazing people.’

Even with the stars aligning as they have throughout her career so far, the fact that O’Brien’s ambitious expectations from five years ago have been met seems to have slightly awed her.

‘I was saying in 2017, my hope is that within five years that nobody would dream of doing a scene without an intimacy coordinator. And that is what’s happened, which is incredible.’

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METRO: The Girl Before star Jessica Plummer praises show’s ‘brilliant’ intimacy coordinator: ‘I felt extremely safe’

19/12/2021

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The Girl Before star Jessica Plummer gave insight into how the cast worked closely under the eye of intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien and explained the ’safe’ practices she brought to set.

The BBC drama tells the story of Jane (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who becomes the tenant of a super minimalist property, designed by mysterious architect Edward (David Oyelowo). 

There’s one catch; she must live by his very specific set of rules and has limits on what and who she can bring into her life, and her new home.

But she soon ends up making some shocking discoveries about the titular ‘girl before’ Emma (Jessica Plummer), who met a grisly end three years previously.

Amid coming to grips with the initial plotline, the series also made for some more difficult scenes for the cast during production, with some very intimate moments to film.

Speaking to press including Metro.co.uk ahead of the show’s release, the former EastEnders actress praised intimacy coach Ita for her work on-set. 

‘Ita O’Brien is such a brilliant intimacy coordinator,’ Jessica begun, as she went on to detail the process of the scenes. 

‘We met, we did rehearsals, we spoke in advance about things that we were comfortable with and we did warm ups.

‘Every time we gave consent, before we did anything.’

The job of an intimacy coordinator is to guide actors through scenes which involve sex or nudity, to make sure they feel safe, protected and have given proper consent.

Jessica gave further insight into how the cast worked through these sorts of scenes.

‘Our approach was kind of just seeing it as like a dance that we gave it beats.

‘There was there was a structure that was like a routine, So we knew it was just very choreographed,’ she added. 

The actress commended Ita for making her feel ‘extremely safe’ throughout the process.

‘Just knowing that before we had filmed it, that was set in place, it made the scene as easy to film as any other,’ she concluded. 

Ita is known for her work as an intimacy coordinator and has been involved with some of the biggest shows of the last few years.

Most notably, she assisted the cast of Normal People in the heart-wrenching series based on Sally Rooney’s novel of the same name.

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Metro: Thank you for coming: Why 2020 was the year TV gave us a sex education

23/12/2020

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Ita O’Brien, who worked on the programme as well as 18 other shows in the last 12 months, explained how her work as an intimacy co-ordinator has made sex on screen both more enjoyable, as well as more educational, for actors and viewers. 


‘We are now watching intimate content where actors have consented and feel comfortable performing well-choreographed scenes,’ she explains. ‘We’re not squirming internally because the actors involved aren’t squirming internally. Now, the intimate content helps tell the story and can have a huge impact, as the actor is now being cared for and their needs aren’t being compromised during sex scenes.’

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Metro: Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal weren’t actually naked in most sex scenes

20/5/2020

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By Abigail Gillibrand

And while there might have been more than 40 minutes of sex scenes across the entire 12 episodes – it turns out the stars of the show Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones barely got their kit off IRL. Talking on Elizabeth Day’s How To Fail podcast, Daisy, who plays Marianne in the soon-to-be iconic series, opened up on how they filmed the intimate scenes – with a little help from sex coordiator Ita O’Brien. ‘Ita would make sure Paul and I would discuss the boundaries and what we were and were not comfortable with,’ the 21-year-old explained. ‘We also agreed on touch and would say, “this area is fine but please stay off this area,” or, “I don’t feel comfortable with this.”‘ . .

Daisy went onto say how for the majority of the time they were covered up, and only took their clothes off for the wider shots. She added: ‘Depending on what shots they were filming we were allowed to wear modesty gear so for a large amount of it we were fully clothed. ‘Then for the wide shot we would make sure we felt comfortable and there was enough protection as possible and then yeah, from action to cut we were able to freestyle knowing what the boundaries were and we were able to act the scene.’

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Metro: Sex Education’s intimacy co-ordinator explains BTS secrets to ‘realistic’ sex scenes

18/1/2020

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Sex Education doesn’t shy away from raunchy scenes seeing Otis and the gang get steamy between the sheets. But while both teenage angst and dreams are at the heart of the binge-worthy series, we can’t help but feel some of the more seductive scenarios might get awkward on set. Talking about the secrets behind those ‘realistic’ sex scenes, intimacy co-ordinator (yes, that’s a thing) Ita O’Brien has opened up on how they keep the cast as comfortable as possible.

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Metro: Sex Education’s NSFW scenes are choreographed move-by-move as Aimee Lou Wood admits it’s ‘really fun’

8/1/2020

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Netflix’s Sex Education might be peppered with NSFW scenes (which shouldn’t come as any surprise) but the cast enjoy filming them as they are all carefully choreographed.

Aimee Lou Wood, who plays Aimee Gibbs in the series, revealed that they all find it ‘really fun’ filming the show’s – often cringeworthy – sex scenes as their moves are planned in advance. 



Speaking ahead of the launch of season two, Aimee told Metro.co.uk that the cast aren’t worried about filming the graphic scenes: ‘It’s actually really fun and I find it really helpful, those sex scenes, because you’re spending a lot of time with your character.

‘You could have full days of doing those kinds of scenes, just you and the director and one other person, so it’s probably the most time that I have personally to really sit with Aimee and be with the character and get to really know who she was.’

She added that seeing how a person behaves in the bedroom helps you get to know them better, explaining: ‘It helped me inform the rest of my characterisation and the other scenes so much, doing those sex scenes, because it says so much about person, how they have sex.

‘So it’s just helpful, it informs so much. That’s why sex scenes are great if they’re done well and if they’re not gratuitous, because it’s a person in their most vulnerable state.

‘You get to feel that you really get to know the character if it’s done honestly and not, you know, mood lighting.’

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metro - Suranne Jones’s Gentleman Jack praised for LGBT representation after lesbian sex scene

1/5/2019

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Metro - Suranne Jones called in an intimacy expert for her racy sex scenes in Gentleman Jack

1/5/2019

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‘We had intimacy directors just so we could tell the story in a very sympathetic and sensitive way.

‘We wanted to explore the way she had sexual affairs because it’s all in there in the diaries. It’s very personal.

‘We wanted someone who was able to give us a language so no one felt embarrassed and we could just talk about every aspect.’
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