Watchdog to keep eye on actors in sex scenes

An ‘intimacy co-ordinator’ is hoping to overhaul Hollywood’s approach to filming sex scenes on screen.

Demi Moore and the late Patrick Swayze in a scene from the film Ghost. Swayze was embarrassed during a sex scene.

An “intimacy co-ordinator” is hoping to overhaul Hollywood’s approach to an aspect of filming that actors have always dreaded: sex on screen.

Alicia Rodis was first hired by HBO, one of the most powerful TV networks, for the second season of its acclaimed series The Deuce, about the pornographic film industry in 1970s New York.

This week the network announced that all of its shows “with intimate scenes will be staffed by an intimacy co-ordinator”.

Ms Rodis’s working day involves voicing concerns to the director that actors might not feel comfortable airing, providing expert movement coaching, or handing out mints.

She was first hired by HBO in response to a request from one of its stars. Emily Meade, who plays Lori, an aspiring porn star in The Deuce, said that Ms Rodis’s arrival “transformed the entire thing”.

When it comes to sex scenes “left to your own devices, you’re just sort of doing what you do in real life”, Meade told Rolling Stone magazine. “And that’s a problem if you don’t want it to feel like real life.”

The airing of the first series coincided with the furore over sexual abuse in Hollywood last year. Ms Rodis founded Intimacy Directors International in 2016 to create a set of standards around sex scenes.

“With intimate moments, from kissing to intense sex scenes, it’s been the practice [for directors] to just say, ‘Whatever you’re comfortable with, just go for it,’ ” Ms Rodis said.

“But if you’re not giving someone a map or an exit or a voice, just asking actors to roll around and get off on each other, are you asking your actors to do sex work? Or tell a story with their movements?”

She added: “If your set doesn’t have an intimacy co-ordinator, you might not be able to tell the story you wanted to tell. At worst, you have actors who are being physically assaulted.”

Directors have been shooting sex scenes since at least the 1933 Czech film Ecstasy.

Decades later, when Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore filmed what became one of the best-known love scenes of all time for Ghost, the only experts that they had on the set were potters to help with the clay moulding.

The pair were uncomfortable and Swayze kept turning bright red, Moore said. “We finally just said, ‘I’m really nervous and I hate this.’ Then it was okay.”

Occasionally men have felt a responsibility to put their partners at ease.

Sir Roger Moore was famously chivalrous. Nigel Havers said that Moore once told him “that whenever he does a bed scene he’d always say to the girl before, ‘Excuse me, I want to apologise now if I get an erection’, and then he’d pause and say, ‘And if I don’t.’’’

The Times