Category: Vulture

Vulture: I May Destroy You’s Paapa Essiedu on Going to Drama School With Michaela Coel

6/7/2020

By Jackson McHenry

What was it like to film Kwame’s assault? I know you all worked with an intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien, who also worked on Normal People. The scene has to make really clear the distinctions between what starts as consensual and what becomes very clearly an assault.

It was obviously intense but also kind of hilarious. Ita O’Brien’s hilarious and hands on. She’s really into using animals as examples. She’ll be showing you an example of a bonobo having sex or a video of cats or dogs having sex and will be like, “In this part of the scene, you’re a bonobo, and then in this part, you’re a horse.” It’s one of those moments where you take a step out of your consciousness and go, “Wow, is this really a job?”

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Vulture: I May Destroy You’s Weruche Opia Became Instant Friends With Michaela Coel

22/6/2020

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By Monica Castillo

Since the show focuses on issues around consent, what was it like preparing for intimate scenes on set? Were there intimacy coordinators involved?

I prefer not to act out sexual scenes, so I had a body double in that scene — a very great body double, because some people think it was me. So I certainly didn’t act out any of that, but there was an intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien, and she was really great. It was a very respectful environment. Only the people involved were there. Though I wasn’t allowed in the room at that time, I did get to know what was going on. I was told what was going to go on, as it was my character who was going to be portrayed. It was a very comfortable and safe space.

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Vulture: How Normal People Does Sex So Good

30/4/2020

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By Rachel Handler

O’Brien kicked off the process of structuring the show’s intimate scenes quite early on. As the actors remember it, they’d only known each other for three or four days when O’Brien asked them to participate in an ice-breaking movement workshop. Mescal, 24, and Edgar-Jones, 21, remember the workshops as slightly mortifying. “We had to do a physical warm-up where we would inhabit animals, which is incredibly useful for the work, but my embarrassment threshold is quite low,” says Mescal. “I’m doing this in front of somebody who I was going to be working with for the next five months. I didn’t want Daisy to judge me or think that I was borderline insane.” Edgar-Jones laughs. “I was bent over because I was trying not to look at you.”

But both agree that the warm-ups were essential for creating a lighter mood and a deep sense of mutual trust that they kept up over the months of shooting. “Filming [sex scenes], you have to be able to have a giggle because it’s a strange situation to be in. You’re friends with all the crew. We’re all having lunch together. So you have to be able to laugh. And Ita just created an environment that was pressure-free,” Edgar-Jones says.

When considering what the sex scenes might look like, O’Brien took her initial cues from Rooney, who co-wrote the script with playwrights Alice Birch and Mark O’Rowe. “There was such a clear charting of the progression of their intimacy, and also the quality of the intimacy, both in the scenes with Marianne and Connell, and then the scenes with the other people they had sex with,” she says. Sometimes the script’s stage directions would be explicit, but sometimes they’d be more vague, something like, “They make love.” In those murkier cases, O’Brien would sit down and discuss the scenes with Abrahamson, Macdonald, Edgar-Jones, and Mescal to find the answer to an essential question: “What shape might this lovemaking take?”

Abrahamson in particular knew exactly how he wanted the scenes to look and feel. He showed O’Brien the photographs of Nan Goldin as a sort of mood board, explaining that he wanted the scenes to feel “unglamorous, just natural and normal, with open nakedness.” He meant that both literally and figuratively: As Mescal puts it, Abrahamson “didn’t want them to feel different from a dialogue scene.” And then, of course, he wanted actual nudity, too, to make their relationship feel authentic. “Lenny spoke about the palette of nakedness,” says O’Brien. “Things like, when you come out of the shower, to not feel that you’ve got to hide — just take the towel off and naturally get dressed. Postcoitally, he wanted them to just naturally be lying there.”

Later in the series, when Marianne and Connell are more comfortable together and established as a couple, Mescal appears postcoital and fully nude with a flaccid penis; he laughs remembering how Abrahamson was “so nervous” about bringing up the nudity during his chemistry read with Edgar-Jones. “He was like, ‘Now you know, Paul, as you’ve seen in the book, we’re requiring and asking you for a full-frontal nudity clause,’” Mescal recalls. “I was totally surprised by the fact that there would be any other way of doing it. If you’re going to do the book correctly, I think that’s required.”

Both actors were thrilled but a little bit frightened by the volume and raw nature of the scenes. “Initially, when I read the scenes, I was really excited by them because they weren’t sex scenes that I had seen onscreen,” says Mescal. “And the prospect of bringing something to the screen that I felt was representative of the reality of young people in love having sex was really exciting to me.” He was admittedly wary, though, of the idea that his naked body would be forever immortalized on the internet. “That is going to be out there forever,” he says. “But then to know that the process was going to be in place with Ita and Lenny and Hettie, I felt totally safe and bolstered.”

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Vulture - Sex Education’s Ncuti Gatwa Doesn’t Want to Play the Gay Best Friend

28/1/2019

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There’s so much repressed aggression released in their hookup scene that it begins as a literal, physical fight. How did you and Connor Swindells approach filming that? Also, I have to ask, did you actually spit in each other’s faces?
No. [Laughs.] We blocked that really carefully and mimed the spitting, then we’d cut and add artificial spit to our cheeks. It does look real, but we were very cautious of trying to be as respectful of each other as possible. On Sex Education, we had an intimacy director, Ita O’Brien, who was there to give us guidance with those scenes. Before we started filming, we had an intimacy workshop. The whole cast and crew was there. Everybody gave examples of sex scenes they’d done before and we had great conversations about how those made them feel. We had conversations about consent and feeling comfortable with your sex scenes. Then we moved on to [laughs] emulating the mating rhythms of snails, lions, dogs, and more. It was very physical work!

We all got to know each other very quickly in that workshop, but it was great because it meant that by the time we got to shooting that scene, the walls had already been broken down. Ita was also on set for it and every sex scene. Before the scene, we choreographed it. It’s literally like a dance. We’d agree between us about where we could touch, how long we’d kiss, and then have those counts in our head when we filmed it. We felt very taken-care-of, so shooting that scene became like another day at the office.

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Vulture - Sex Education’s Emma Mackey Doesn’t Mind Those ‘Weird’ Margot Robbie Jokes

16/1/2019

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It’s interesting that it was so comfortable, because I imagine it could potentially have gotten really awkward. What were your sex scenes like?
It was ultimately quite fun. When you’re doing intimacy scenes, it’s a closed set and you’ve only got the key people there, so that takes the pressure off because you haven’t got like 80 people looking at you having sex. But it was all so well-handled — we had an intimacy workshop way before filming, where we spoke about our worries and any questions we might have. . .

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Vulture: I May Destroy You’s Paapa Essiedu on Going to Drama School With Michaela Coel

Vulture: I May Destroy You’s Weruche Opia Became Instant Friends With Michaela Coel

Vulture: How Normal People Does Sex So Good

Vulture - Sex Education’s Ncuti Gatwa Doesn’t Want to Play the Gay Best Friend

Vulture - Sex Education’s Emma Mackey Doesn’t Mind Those ‘Weird’ Margot Robbie Jokes

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