Marci Liroff wants you to know one thing for sure: “This is not porn. This is my imagination.
Liroff served as the intimacy coordinator on Season 2 of Starz’s drama “Hightown,” which features plenty of sex and nudity — but she didn’t have anyone to rehearse those scenes in Season 1.
“I thought they did a great and convincing job in season one without an intimate coordinator,” she said diverse. “But I knew I could make it better.”
Intimacy coordinators are starting to increase in demand after expanding the #MeToo era conversations about sexual misconduct in film and television to include morals and protocol surrounding on-screen sex. Notably, The Deuce star Emily Meade reached out to HBO in 2018 about needing someone to help manage the physical demands of acting on a show about sex work. This led to the appointment of the well-publicized intimate coordinator Alicia Rhodes.
Lerov has worked in film and television for decades as a choice director, until she looked for what she calls “Chapter Two,” an opportunity to use her skills for something new, when she read about Rhodes.
“I just started digging deeper and deeper,” says Lerov. “And that led me to a woman named Amanda Blumenthal, who was the first intimate coordinator in Los Angeles. Her first job was to “orgasm” — they threw her in the deep end of the pool.”
Because of how Blumenthal was able to facilitate such intense sexual content while maintaining the safety and comfort of the actors on set, Liroff decided that coordinating intimacy was the business for her. I learned that Blumental had started a six-month program of training others for the same job and joined the second cohort of the course.
“It’s in my DNA to speak on behalf of those who don’t have a voice,” says Lerov. “In the acting process, I’ve always been protecting the actors and trying to put together a script for them to be as good as possible.”
British intimate coordinator David Thackeray, who worked on the third season of the Netflix comedy Sex Education, began his entertainment career as an actor and director, working in several films and short plays. Then he found out about Etta O’Brien, who is arguably the industry’s premier intimate coordinator. She pioneered the position after launching her career as a motion picture director and making headlines for helping to build the critically acclaimed sex scenes in Seasons 1 and 2 of “Sex Education”, Hulu’s “Normal People” and the HBO limited series “I May Destroy You”. “
A major factor in Thackeray’s decision to pursue this type of work was his negative experiences acting in intimate scenes.
“I had to be completely naked on stage as an actor once. I was promised closed rehearsals that didn’t exist,” he says. “I ended up doing that in tech [and in front of the full cast and crew], not in the actual training space. It is not done correctly. “
Work begins in pre-production. First, the intimate coordinator will meet with the director or producer to assess the goals of each intimate scene. Lerov doesn’t just focus on body parts and sexual acts: “Sometimes it’s emotional, hot, and crazy. Sometimes it’s endearing and very sensual,” she says. Aspects such as tone and pace are important for gaining approval as well.
The following meetings are held in private between the coordinator and the actor, without any of the directors present. “In our training we learned to get what we call ‘enthusiastic approval,’” says Lerov. “If you ask an actor, ‘Are you okay with your partner squeezing your nipple?’ and the actor says, ‘Uh… um… well, yes.” I’ll take that as a no. I want to see that they are completely comfortable with this.”
Next, the coordinator works with lawyers to write nudity for the actors’ contracts, so that the production is responsible for respecting the performers’ boundaries.
The involvement of the intimacy coordinator in the choreography varies from group to group; Some filmmakers direct the movement themselves with the coordinator’s supervision, while others step back and ask the coordinator to handle the whole thing. This point of the process often involves collaborating with the fashion, makeup, prop, stunt and camera departments.
“A lot of what we do is cheat and disguise the mask, so that it looks really good, but they don’t do the act,” says Lerov. Part of that is the modest clothing we help the actors choose and sometimes wear [for them], and the barriers that we may place in the scene. These could be pieces of foam that we attach to the reps, or sometimes a little Pilates ball that gets most of the air out, and we can put that in between. Sometimes I use bra attachments or a small pad. We’ve all gotten very, very creative.”
Only very essential cast and crew members for intimate scenes are allowed to see what’s going on: this means that no specific photographers are allowed in and that tents must be set up for existing screens so only approved personnel can see each shot.
The most complex part of coordinating intimacy is trying to measure all the nuances of the room during the shooting. Thackeray says the listening skills he developed as an actor help him realize if the actor needs some extra support to continue — or even if filming needs to stop altogether.
“You have to be able to transform all the time. It really feels the mood of the room,” he says. “That’s why pre-conversations are so important, because then you know how it’s going to go. [feel] When you work that day. But again, when you come along, that may have changed. Perhaps the artist’s morning was really bad. Perhaps their temper appears in a different way. [It’s important to be] Realize when you can have a joke and have fun and when it’s time to deliver. Do we need to move the scene a little faster here? Do I need to check in? There is also excessive scrutiny. If you ask someone if they are okay [too many] Times, they’ll start to wonder if they’re okay. It is accurate.”
Ultimately, this sensitivity is there to enable good representation.
Actress Allison Oliver talks about her experience working with O’Brien while performing on Hulu’s Conversation with Friends. diverse: “You know the choreography and the physicality of what you’re going to do, and there’s a muscle memory there. You can actually go in and play the scene and think about how your character might be thinking at that moment.”
“Hopefully those scenes are extensions [the characters’] The conversations, and it’s not there for the tips,” adds co-star Joe Alwyn. “It’s an important part of how these two characters communicate. They are not at all very good at saying what they feel, or even knowing how they feel, but they have that connection physically. It is often in those moments when they are able to be freer and more cheerful than they are with others around them. You can see the sweetness that gets packed sometimes.”
Legal terms, rehearsals, and sensitive conversations are a key part of coordinating intimacy. But when it’s done right, those aspects of the job work in service
Storytelling – from deconstructing sweetness and other stories sometimes hidden in the sheets.
Emily Longerita contributed to this story.
