Ewan McGregor Says It Was “Necessary” to Have Intimacy Coordinator for Sex Scenes With Wife

Carly Thomas
·2 min read
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Ewan McGregor is opening up about why it was “necessary” to have an intimacy coordinator on set during sex scenes with his wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

The actor recently opened up to the Radio Times about what it was like starring alongside his wife in the TV miniseries A Gentleman in Moscow, as well as why it can be “odd” filming intimate moments in front of an entire crew.

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“We did have an intimacy coordinator!” McGregor said. “It’s still necessary, because it’s also about the crew, and it’s odd to be naked in front of people, it’s odd to be intimate in front of the camera. If you were doing a dance scene, you’d have a choreographer. It’s an important part of the work now, because it’s somebody that the director and actors meet in the middle.”

The Bleeding Love star explained how in the past, a younger actor — similar in age to his 22-year-old daughter Esther — may have felt pressured by a director or executive to film something they weren’t necessarily comfortable with, which is why intimacy coordinators are so important today.

“My daughter is 22. If an older, famous director goes to a 22-year-old and says, ‘I want you to be naked in this scene,’ that actress might feel, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to do it, my career might depend on it.’ And then five years after that, she could look back and go, ‘I wish I hadn’t. Why am I naked in that scene? It’s unnecessary,'” McGregor said. “Now there’s somebody she talks to whose career doesn’t rest on the shoulders of this person.”

McGregor isn’t the only actor to open up in recent years about the importance of intimacy coordinators on TV and movie sets.

Kate Winslet told The New York Times Magazine earlier this year that she “would have benefited from an intimacy coordinator every single time I had to do a love scene or be partially naked or even a kissing scene. It would have been nice to have had someone in my corner, because I always had to stand up for myself.”

Emma Thompson also called the use of intimacy coordinators “fantastically important” in 2022, adding,  “I don’t know [if] you were speaking to somebody who found it distracting, but another conversation you might find [is] that people go, ‘It made me comfortable. It made me feel safe. It made me feel as though I was able to do this work.’”

A Gentleman in Moscow, which premieres March 29 on Paramount+ with Showtime, follows a Russian aristocrat who’s spared from death and banished to an attic hotel room, after being sentenced to house arrest, while the Bolshevik Revolution plays out before him. Winstead plays Anna Urbanova and McGregor stars as Alexander Rostov.

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