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The New York Times: In ‘Dangerous Liaisons,’ Alice Englert and Nicholas Denton Play the Game4/11/2022  The sex scenes could have made for more mortifying stories. But the actors worked closely with the show’s intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien, to make them feel safe and liberating. “It was actually a really good bonding thing,” Denton said. And with sex out of the way — lots of it, especially in the first episode — they could navigate the riskier contours of Camille and Pascal’s relationship.
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 By Eleanor Stanford
What was it like working with the show’s intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien? She makes any of those scenes so chill and safe. The example she sets and the practices she keeps is what makes those scenes feel real. I did a show awhile ago called “Press,” and Charlotte Riley and I had some sex scenes in that, and we obviously didn’t have an intimacy coordinator. It was one of my first jobs of that level onscreen. She’d already had an amazing career, so she had the experience to get us to discuss it, ask me what I thought. But if it was the other way around, or if neither of us had had that experience, it’s fully the blind leading the blind in a situation that’s incredibly dangerous and intimate. It’s part of a language of “I May Destroy You,” that sexuality and that physicality. And Michaela is switched on, so she wants the actors on her show to feel safe. More . . .  “Young people don’t want to be patronized,” she said. “They want to be challenged and told difficult stories.”
The series’s straightforward approach to sex is also particularly timely, given increasing cultural awareness about the unrealistic male fantasies perpetuated by online porn. “It’s tackling different sexual topics with an honesty I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere, embracing the awkwardness of teenagers’ first exploring themselves as sexual beings,” said Ita O’Brien, the show’s intimacy coordinator. (In his review of “Sex Education” for The Times, the TV critic James Poniewozik wrote that “sex, in this show, isn’t an ‘issue’ or a problem or a titillating lure: It’s an aspect of health.”) Nunn acknowledged that working on the new season during a pandemic has not been easy. But she has found comfort in the show’s comedy, which helps her stave off the “constant sense of low-level anxiety and dread in the air that is difficult to ignore,” she said. As a writer, Nunn added, she is accustomed to working mostly in isolation. And that work continues to feel necessary. “The main message of the show is the importance of honest communication,” she said. “Hopefully that will always be something worth writing about.” More . . .  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. More . . . |
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