Ita O’Brien made sex scenes look real on Sex Education and Normal People. Can she help my marriage?

Irish ‘intimacy coordinator’ Ita O’Brien has choreographed memorable sex scenes onstage and onscreen. So I invited her into my bedroom.

Intimacy co-ordinator Ita O'Brien and (inset) Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar Jones in Normal People. Main picture: Nicholas Dawkes

It’s Saturday morning, three days after my afternoon with Ita O’Brien, the ­“intimacy co-ordinator” who choreographed the sex scenes in TV dramas Normal People, I May Destroy You and Sex Education. ­Normally I would be ­enjoying a quiet cup of tea with the paper, but instead I am “eye-gazing” with my wife. If you want to have a good intimate relationship, O’Brien says, you have to do the groundwork. You have to connect with your physical self and your inner emotional landscape. You have to be open, you have to be present, all that stuff. You can’t just take your clothes off and hope for the best.

What does this mean in practice? Right now it means I’m looking into Harriet’s eyes and she’s looking into mine. That’s already quite a lot to be going on with – we’ve been married for 20 years and it’s fair to say we stare lovingly at each other less frequently than we once did. Prolonged staring occurs these days only when someone has forgotten to put the bins out for the second week running / has eaten all the nice bread / has used all the hot water. But there’s even more to this exercise. Harriet has to take a minute to describe what she sees. Then I have to take a minute to say what I see. We have to start with the basics (“Your laughter lines have got deeper”; “I like your dress”; “You need a haircut”) but in rounds two and three we must “reach out and share what we are ­wondering about each other”.

We have already walked hand-in-hand ­barefoot around the garden. We have already done a heart dance, which is a long heart-to-heart hug. Harriet is delighted. Finally, after all these years, her husband is showing signs of emotional intelligence. Me? I’ll tell you later.

First, back to Wednesday and a sunny ­afternoon in a pub garden in Kent, southeast England, where O’Brien and her husband ­Russell, a consultant whom she has been with for 29 years, decamped during the great ­pandemic exodus from London. We’re meeting because O’Brien, 60, is trying something ­momentous. She has taken everything she has learnt from her career as a dancer, an actress and, most significantly, as an intimacy co-­ordinator and applied it to real life and real ­relationships. Intimacy, the resulting book, ­appears to have a paradox at its heart – can the woman who helps actors fake sex help the rest of us to have better actual sex lives?

Fortunately, there is an overlap. Although O’Brien repeatedly states during our conversation that she is not a marriage counsellor, she insists that the intimacy she co-ordinates on set is the same intimacy we need in real life.

‘You would never improvise a sword fight, so why would you improvise a sex scene?’ Picture: Camilla Greenwell

Ncuti Gatwa and Connor Swindells in a scene from Netflix’s Sex Education.

“It’s all about how we engage with one ­another,” she says. “There’s emotional intimacy, spiritual intimacy, intimacy with friends and family. Physical intimacy is just one kind. They all feed into the richness of your relationships.”

On the face of it Intimacy is just another self-help book trying to self-help us to find ­connection in our increasingly disconnected, screen-based lives. In the days after I finished reading it, though, I’ve found myself returning to it. What it won’t do, I’m afraid, chaps, is teach you how to be a sex god. What it does ­instead is to encourage examination (at one point of your genitalia, with a hand mirror). With all the honesty and openness you would expect from a director of movement, O’Brien is determined to stop us all being quite so embarrassed about, you know, um, well, s-e-x.

Within ten minutes of meeting she’s telling me how very different male arousal is from ­female arousal. Men are linear – bish, bash, bosh. Women are not linear at all. “The clitoris is a y-shaped organ that has as much arousal tissue as the penis,” she says as I resist the urge to look at the ceiling. “It starts off lying ­horizontal above the bladder and then, as it engorges...” She offers to find the diagrams in the book but because, um, you know, I ask a different question. Which, I suppose, is the whole problem.

It seems strange now that until very recently the vast majority of sex scenes in film, TV and on stage were improvised. The received wisdom was that too much direction ruined the ­spontaneity – much better to let the actors just get on with it. “That has led to abuse and ­trauma,” O’Brien writes. “It has damaged ­actors’ creativity and their ability to perform.”

It seems strange, too, that when she first ­proposed what would become her “Intimacy on Set” guidelines in 2017, they weren’t ­immediately adopted. As she puts it, “You would never improvise a sword fight, so why would you improvise a sex scene?” That changed quickly in the wake of the ­Harvey Weinstein scandal and the MeToo movement and, today, intimacy co-ordination is an entire industry within an industry.

The idea for it came during her classes at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in north London in 2015. Students were performing ­intimate scenes and “in the absence of clear choreography, the physicality was all wrong”, she says. “When their teachers tried to discuss the performance the students’ eyes just glazed over. There were extensive guidelines for everything except the intimate stuff and I realised I could change that.”

Michaela Coel and Marouane Zotti in a scene from HBO’s I May Destroy You.

In 14 bullet points, O’Brien’s guidelines set out not only the rules during a sex scene (“When kissing, no use of tongues as standard practice”) but also all the rules leading up to a sex scene (“No initial auditions or screen tests are to include sex scenes or to involve nudity”). In place of the historical “just get on with it”, O’Brien now works through the 14 points with the actors and directors – each beat of a scene is rehearsed, each ­movement ­discussed at length until everyone feels ­comfortable. Consent is sought at every stage down to the last nipple and buttock because “intimacy is about consent and anything else is about power”.

It’s because of all the planning rather than in spite of it that a good sex scene feels authentic, she argues (although not everyone agrees: Mikey Madison, who won the best ­actress Oscar for her role in Anora, declined to use an intimacy co-ordinator). How does this all apply to real life, then? “I’m not a marriage counsellor,” O’Brien says again, but then she begins to offer counsel. “I’m proud of the fact that these guidelines have lifted the lid on intimacy,” she says. “That’s what we should bring to our relationships as well. Let’s have openness about what we want in our intimate lives.”

You perhaps won’t be surprised to hear that O’Brien had a strict Catholic upbringing. Her Northern Irish mother and Irish father raised her in southeast London and sent her to the local Holy Trinity Convent School. “Sexual ­intercourse only happens inside the bounds of matrimony,” she remembers her heavily ­pregnant biology teacher telling the class. “And only to a loving couple with the intention of having a baby.” Her mother, a midwife, was ­embarrassed when her teenage daughter asked how to use a tampon.

O’Brien talks a lot about shame and embarrassment, about how little we consider and share our needs and desires. In the gap this leaves we take our cues from the storytellers – once from playwrights and novelists and today from people we see on our screens. “And not just from television and film but, for young ­people, even shorter forms like YouTube and TikTok,” she adds.

“Which is alarming,” I suggest.

“Very alarming.”

The Hollywood portrayal of sex usually involves an enthusiastic or aggressively insistent man, a reluctant but easily convinced woman and about 30 seconds of foreplay before painless penetration and then orgasms all round. Porn is all that but worse.

Ita O’Brien directs actors rehearsing a sex scene during filming in London, 2018. Picture: Sven Arnstein

Small wonder, she says, that so many couples assume they are ­dysfunctional. “Women watch all this and think they have bad libido. It’s not bad, it’s just different. But I do appreciate that not every sex scene can be 40 minutes long.” More than once people have told her that a sex scene she helped to curate had changed their life; I suspect it’s that educational impact that drives her most.

Irritatingly, there are no shortcuts to intimacy. In order to find it, O’Brien says, you have to know what you want. In order to know what you want, you have to be present. In order to be present, you have to be embodied (which is just a fancy way of saying you have to stop sitting there and scrolling on your phone all day).

O’Brien peppers her book with exercises to facilitate all this. Despite being cynical and ­disembodied, I found some of the exercises rather ­brilliant. Close your eyes, for example, and imagine you’re in a waterfall – let the water wash away the stresses of the day. (She suggests splashing water on your wrists to expedite the washing away, which sounds ridiculous – but, wow, it works.) Some of them are a bit much, though. ­Imagine, for another example, you’re a fish and your partner is a knot of seaweed you’re ­swimming through. I just couldn’t do that one.

The 12 whole pages devoted to foot massage suggest a conspiracy – have all the wives, mine definitely included, formed a secret foot ­massage cabal to bribe O’Brien to do this? No, it’s about connection (again) of course, but I have yet to show Harriet that chapter.

I find myself wondering about O’Brien’s own relationship – it mustbe at black-belt intimacy level, all day-long foot massage, fish and seaweed? Because she does not have her husband’s consent to spill the beans, O’Brien won’t go into detail, which is sensible. All she’ll say is that her husband finds the eye-gazing a bit much, so they’ve settled with a daily walk, hand in hand, in the garden instead. In any long-term relationship it’s easy to go through the motions, but for O’Brien communication is key. Not least, she says, because of how much we change as the relationship lengthens. At 60, she is now in what she calls her enchantress phase – out of the parenting trenches and embracing another exciting stage of life. And of course she will be communicating all that to her husband.

“The underlying theme of my work and my life is the need for open communication and transparency,” she concludes. “There is no ­substitute for it.” Harriet and I had to finish the eye-gazing ­exercise early. For five minutes we focused ­entirely on each other and, once the awkwardness of the concept had passed, it became quite a beautiful little thing to do.

“When you have finished,” O’Brien writes, “first talk about the experience itself before ­allowing the conversation to drift between you.” But our youngest was late for cricket and the washing wasn’t going to hang itself, and having the time to let a conversation drift is a luxury too far. I ­suppose that is the problem as well.