The Conversations With Friends team on crafting intimacy scenes that foreground character over titillation
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Adapting a Sally Rooney novel comes with a specific set of challenges — making a very internal story visual, leaning into meaningful silences, and crafting sex scenes that exude intimacy without an explicit sexiness.
Luckily for the team behind Conversations With Friends, available now on Hulu, they'd already knocked it out of the park once with Normal People.
"It's always important to be led by the material," director Lenny Abrahamson tells EW on the latest episode of adaptations podcast Screen After Reading. "There are natural similarities. It's still Sally's writing. It's a focus on younger people in Dublin and Ireland. It's their concerns about the relationships that they have and what they mean and who they are and all of those things. There's a natural similarity, which we didn't want to artificially interrupt."
"But then there are very big differences also," he continues. "Conversations With Friends is, in a way, a more complex book in terms of shape. You've got four central characters, albeit Frances is at the very middle. And you have a very messy series of relationships, which don't resolve, as easily as they do in Normal People, into a straightforward love story. We were led by that and the need to respect that complexity. Also, I was very keen to push the style that we developed during Normal People even further to give this one even more space and lean into that low-key storytelling style."
Part of differentiating Conversations came via the shooting format; Abrahamson shot the series on film instead of digital. "The way we shot digitally on Normal People was a particularly lovely way," he explains. "It would've been hard to move away from that because it would've been artificially distinguishing it from Normal People and ending up somewhere perhaps not as good and not as native to that format. Radically changing the format was one way of resetting ourselves for this new creative enterprise."
Enda Bowe/Hulu; Penguin Random House
One thing that didn't change was the extensive need for sex scenes. Normal People hones in on various phases of Marianne (Daisy Edgar Jones) and Connell's (Paul Mescal) relationship, often dominated by physical connection. Similarly, Conversations With Friends focuses on the affair Frances (Alison Oliver) has with Nick (Joe Alwyn), while still attempting to sort out her feelings for her best friend and ex-girlfriend Bobbi (Sasha Lane).
Rooney's writing offers up sex scenes that are purposefully devoid of eroticism. "Sally's sex scenes are so good. They're so precise," says writer Meadhbh McHugh. "I would borrow from that if I could, take the language from there, but with full trust that the director and the intimacy coordinator and the actors were going to figure that out. It's about being very attuned to, what's the mood? What's the temperature? Where are they at right now with each other? Every sex scene hopefully is different from each other in a certain way. It's a different context. Are they on holiday in Croatia and sneaking around? Or is it when they've come back together? Or at what point are they at with the story? It's very intimate, but this is very much between these two people. It's not designed to be titillating."
An essential component of getting that right was intimacy coordinator Ita O'Brien, who choreographed the sex scenes as intricately you would a dance or fight sequence. "It's as important as the dinner table scene. So, why shouldn't it get as much choreography and as much blocking?" posits Jemima Kirke, who portrays Nick's wife, Melissa. "Maybe you want to make it look like your idea of the best sex ever because you want people [to] think you seem like a sex god, but really we're talking about a story here. And your moves don't matter. We're talking about the character."
Alwyn and Oliver, who share the bulk of the series' sex scenes, say that character-first model was at the forefront of each of those sequences. "It's important to know your character's intimacy," says Oliver. "How is your character intimate? And separating that from yourself. That's such a big part of the book — about their intimacy and for Frances, how she is intimate and how that shifts and changes and how her intimacy with Nick is different to her intimacy with Bobbi. That's all part of the storytelling too."
"Lenny always spoke about the intimacy scenes like extensions of conversations," adds Alwyn. "They're not there for the sake of gratuity, and they hopefully have a slightly different meaning and feeling each time. It's also a big part of the way that those two characters are able to communicate. They're not good at speaking to each other outside of that, particularly. The moments when they're able to find sweetness and joy is in intimate moments."
Listen to the latest episode of Screen After Reading below for more from the team behind Conversations With Friends.
Check out more from EW's Screen After Reading, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and more as we dive into the art of bringing books to the screen.
Related content:
