Beyond Sex Scenes: The Role of Intimacy Coordinators Has Expanded
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Showrunners and filmmakers began bringing intimacy coordinators onto TV and film sets to ensure that performers felt safe and their boundaries respected while filming sex scenes. But as two top practitioners told TheWrap, the role has expanded to include any depiction of “heightened emotion,” including assaults, deaths and childbirth.
Kathy Kadler, who comes from a nursing background and has been an intimacy coordinator for three years, worked on both seasons of Showtime’s “Yellowjackets.” She found the cast relying on her more often in filming Season 2, in which characters dealt with a stillbirth, cannibalism, murder and dissociative breaks from reality.
Jasmin Savoy Brown, who plays Teen Taissa on the drama series, expressed how thankful she was to have an intimacy coordinator on set as an overall mental health resource.
“It’s a really grueling, exhausting show,” Brown told TheWrap shortly after filming wrapped on Season 2. “I think people forget that the ’96 timeline, almost all our scenes, especially this season, are traumatic. It was a lot of screaming, crying, throwing up, running, hiding, and it takes a toll — mentally and emotionally. I’m still decompressing.”
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“Last season, [Kadler] was there for a couple of sex scenes and then people started requesting her for other stuff — anytime there’s anything that might cause an emotional or psychological response,” Brown explained. “She emailed us and asked if she wanted us around, and towards the last couple episodes, she was there every day.”
“My relationship with those folks is quite different from someone I’m just seeing once in a season,” Kadler said. “There’s a certain relationship that includes trust and an understanding of the work that I’m doing, as well as who this person is as an actor and what they have going on in their life.”
Amanda Cutting, the intimacy coordinator for Netflix’s “The Night Agent,” has seen the industry evolve and mostly embrace the role she and her colleagues provide over her seven years in the field.
“When I first started, it was very much around simulated intercourse, scenes of nudity, sexual assault scenes. And then it grew to also include scenes of grief or heightened emotion,” she said.
“People seeing what a benefit having an intimacy coordinator was on intimate scenes… often that was one of the things that spurred people to say, ‘Oh, we can call someone in for more than just a scene where there’s nudity,'” she added.
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As actress Sarah Desjardins told TheWrap recently, one scene in “The Night Agent” was particularly traumatic to shoot. Her college-age character, the vice president’s daughter, ditches her security team to have sex with her art teacher (played by Greyston Holt). What she doesn’t know is that he’s part of a bigger plot. She’s in her underwear when a kidnapper (Andre Anthony) bursts in, shoots the art teacher and drags her away, half-dressed, screaming and covered in blood.
Even though Desjardins was filming the scene with Anthony, a good friend of nearly a decade, she said her body shut down: “Andre is the most wonderful person, but after we finished filming it, my body felt like, ‘I want this person away from me.'”
Desjardins, who also plays Callie Sadecki on “Yellowjackets,” explained, “It took a couple hours to come down from shooting that, for my body to be, ‘OK, this person is OK.’ As actors, intellectually, we know something is safe and not real. But it is our job to kind of trick our body into thinking that it is. This was such a visceral example of that.”
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Cutting said part of her job is to help flag traumatic scenes like the kidnapping and recommend scheduling them when the actor isn’t going from something so intense to, say, a love scene. “That’s going to be a hard emotional swing for the body to go through. So making sure that we’ve got enough time to allow that performer to shake that off, they might want to space that between a couple of scenes,” she said.
The “Night Agent” kidnapping scene was shot at the end of the day and Cutting gave Desjardins lavender oil to help her calm down. Essentials oils are just one tool in her on-set kit, which also includes dark chocolate, “which helps release dopamine and affects serotonin and endorphin levels in the body,” Cutting said.
Intimacy coordinators also consider the impact on crew who may be forced to watch repeated takes of upsetting scenes.
“Part of our risk assessment is to flag things where they might want to consider a counselor or psychologist on set. We want to make sure that someone who’s having to watch this scene over and over also has that opportunity to get help,” said Cutting.
Kadler has a similar approach: “When I’m first developing relationships with productions and I see there’s some heavy material like suicide, abortion or childbirth that can put talent in a vulnerable position, I will ask, ‘Have you considered this as vulnerable material?’ And if so, let’s talk about how we can support [the cast], whether that be providing a list of resources, having me on set, or whether we consider having a psychologist or counselor or some other professional there.”
They might also suggest adding trigger warnings and a hotline to call for viewers, such as those that appear on Netflix’s “The Politician” and HBO’s “Euphoria.”
To illustrate how a coordinator’s role can involve scenes that aren’t traditionally considered part of their purview, Kadler mentioned working with a young male actor, who was “heading into panic attack mode” about shooting an upcoming medical scene: “He said, ‘I just don’t know who to talk to and I don’t want anybody else to know that this is happening in this moment. And given that you are a nurse, can you help me?'”
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Kadler told the assistant directors that the actor needed a few minutes’ break. “We were able to talk things through and I provided him with some local resources. And he was able to ground himself and get back to work. But throughout that day, I was constantly checking in with him,” she recalled.
“I think intimacy coordinators can serve a really powerful, positive role for people who are in intimate and vulnerable moments,” Ashley Kolaya, the lead impact and engagement officer of USC Annenberg’s Mental Health Storytelling Initiative, told TheWrap.
However, Kolaya said that intimacy coordinators don’t necessarily have the training and background of a mental health professional, something her initiative, which works with several studios, is happy to provide.
“If there’s something that goes beyond what the intimacy coordinator feels comfortable navigating, they might come to us and say, ‘Hey, we need somebody who’s got some expertise in, say, PTSD,’ and we have a network of MDs and PhDs who are leading researchers who can have play a specialized role,” she said.
Still, the actors who work with intimacy coordinators in expanding roles said they appreciated the assistance they’re getting.
“They’re helpful in a lot of ways that you wouldn’t necessarily expect,” said Desjardins. “I’m very grateful to have that as a role on set now.”
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