Category: The Times - Intimacy on Set

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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The Times: Normal People: Intimacy coach made love scenes a joy to film

13/4/2020

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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The Times: Netflix’s Sex Education tackles the shocking rise of sexual assaults on public transport

26/1/2020

It’s a strong storyline for a show that is essentially a comedy, but Sex Education is unique. It dares to go where no other teenage drama has been before and portrays young sex (gay and straight) realistically and graphically . The assault story is expertly driven forward by a team of talented young actors, supported on set by the intimacy co-ordinator Ita O’Brien and an excellent script.

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the Times - How Hollywood is fixing its problem with sex

31/7/2019

The film industry has responded to abuses of power by encouraging the presence of intimacy consultants during the shooting of nude scenes. Ita O’Brien, Britain’s first intimacy co-ordinator, has worked on the TV shows Sex Education and Gentleman Jack. She has facilitated agreements on which body parts can be touched and encouraged everyone to talk about sex in an adult way. Both series were praised for their naturalistic and fun sexual encounters.

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The times - Nudity, celebrity and lesbian sex scenes — tales from the TV intimacy co-ordinator

16/5/2019

Ita O’Brien is sitting in an office chair, her hands resting on its arms, leaning slightly forward, her expression rapt and panting like a dog. “Huh, huh, huh! OK, now you’ve got the wild cats,” she cries, beginning to wiggle while softly wailing. “Eeh, oowah, ooow. OK. And now let’s gently allow that to become human.” O’Brien exhales, one could say orgasmically. “Er, aah.”

O’Brien is a pioneer, Britain’s first intimacy co-ordinator, a woman who choreographs sex scenes and — through exercises such as the animal ones she is demonstrating — teaches actors how to be comfortable rolling about virtually naked, apparently in the throes of sexual ecstasy, in front of a film crew.

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The times - Lesbian drama Gentleman Jack plays it safe by employing ‘intimacy co‑ordinator’

10/5/2019

She is known as Britain’s first modern lesbian: a 19th-century Yorkshire landowner who chronicled her passionate sexual encounters with women in code in her voluminous diaries.

When the code is deciphered for viewers of BBC One’s much-anticipated new drama about the life of Anne Lister, they can be sure of one thing: the sex scenes were sensitively filmed.

That is because Gentleman Jack, starring Suranne Jones as Lister, is one of the first major BBC series to employ an intimacy co-ordinator, a role that has come to prominence in Hollywood in response to the MeToo scandal.

Intimacy co-ordinators are hired to guarantee the wellbeing of actors taking part in sex scenes, making sure that they are comfortable with everything they are asked to do.

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The Times - Sex Education: Behind the scenes of the hot new Netflix series

2/2/2019

They range from a boy who does creative things with a warm melon and a girl who vomits on her boyfriend’s penis, to a teenager with rampant pubic hair (“I’m like a wolverine”) and a virgin who writes a sci-fi comic whose heroine goes “on a quest for an alien dick to deflower her”. All of adolescent carnality is there in Sex Education, the super-stylised Netflix comedy that has seized the imagination like no British school series since Skins and which the streaming service claims has been watched by 40 million households around the world.

If you’re a member of the twentysomething cast, how do you prepare for such a kaleidoscopic bombardment of rumpy pumpy? Well, as the Bloodhound Gang once sang: “You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals/ So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.” Yes, before shooting started, the actors took part in an animal-inspired shagging workshop.

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The Times - The new rules of sex: how Hollywood is rethinking on-screen intimacy in the post-Weinstein era

14/1/2018

In the wake of the #MeToo scandal, the movie business is reviewing how sex scenes are directed. Chrissy Iley joins an “intimacy workshop” where actors can master the new code of close contact