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Sex cops or guardian angels? Why intimacy coordinators are dividing Hollywood

Carnal: Sean Bean and Joely Richardson in Lady Chatterley's Lover in the 1993 film by Ken Russell - Alamy
Carnal: Sean Bean and Joely Richardson in Lady Chatterley's Lover in the 1993 film by Ken Russell - Alamy

Never again, thanks to contractual requirements for intimacy coordinators on film sets, will the infamy of a Last Tango in Paris (1972) hinge on one of its performers being kept in the dark – non-consensually – about the type of sex scene her director and co-star had in mind: a rape, with butter as lubricant. As such, these wardens of close physical contact are seen as a hugely necessary safeguard, especially in the post-#MeToo environment.

But not every actor is like-minded. This week, Sean Bean had criticisms of the practice to offer in an interview with the Times. He seemed to be speaking hypothetically, as befits a 63-year-old not often called up these days for on-screen rolls in the hay. “I should imagine it slows down the thrust of it,” he initially mused. “Ha – not the thrust, that's the wrong word. It would spoil the spontaneity[....] I think the natural way lovers behave would be ruined by someone bringing it right down to a technical exercise.”

Bean mentioned one of his most famous carnal forays, with Joely Richardson, in the 1993 Ken Russell version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Tame though it now may seem by the standards of, say, Gaspar Noé, this is one of the racier things ever to go out on the BBC’s Sunday-night schedules. As on the page, the forbidden passion of D.H. Lawrence’s tale unfolded through sex, within carefully prescribed, BBC-appropriate limits: there’s plenty of naked frolicking in the rain, for instance, but Bean clutches a bouquet as a frontal fig-leaf.

It’s hard to say whether intimacy coordinators (ICs), had they existed 30 years ago, would truly have been the mood-killing meddlers Bean suggests: there’s ample evidence of a taste police inhibiting that production as it is. But there’s no doubt that the comfort of actors required to get busy on film sets – the main point of ICs being introduced over the past few years – has historically been far less of a concern than it is now.

To my knowledge, no one – Richardson, for instance – has ever complained about Bean overstepping the mark in some Brando-esque fashion. But submitting to the director’s will is a slightly different matter, and this is how times have changed.

Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris - United Artists
Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris - United Artists

Richardson should know. In Netflix’s forthcoming remake of Lady Chatterley, with Emma Corrin in the lead role, she plays the housekeeper, Mrs Bolton. “With this one,” she told Claire Allfree for the Telegraph in June, “we’ve got a woman [Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre] directing, for one thing. And of course you now have people on set to say what’s OK and what’s not. In the old days you were simply told to ‘manage’.”

“I loved Ken”, Richardson added, “but we went through a right journey on that film. One day we had a big fight, a difference of opinion over something technical, and straight away afterwards I had to do this highly vulnerable sex scene. Those were such different days in the film industry. There was nothing like the protection you have now.”

Responses to Bean’s remarks have shown a widespread appreciation for the work ICs do looking out for the rights of performers – especially women. West Side Story star Rachel Zegler, whose scenes with Ansel Elgort were carefully monitored in that film, tweeted that “spontaneity in intimate scenes can be unsafe. Wake up.”

Emma Thompson came at the question from a slightly different angle. She argued, on the one hand, that the involvement of ICs was “the most fantastic introduction in our work”, explaining that the surrounding presence of (mostly male) crew members made any sex scene “not a comfortable situation, full stop”.

And yet in her most recent film, as a sexually experimenting schoolteacher in the frisky two-hander Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Thompson and co-star Daryl McCormack opted to work without an IC. They decided to sculpt their relationship on set purely with the director, Sophie Hyde, and to build on the “safety and the connection we had already found”, to quote McCormack.

One of the first times ICs became a publicised phenomenon was on the BBC’s Sally Rooney adaptation Normal People, which was widely praised for the frankness of its sex. Jemima Kirke, the outspoken star of Girls, Sex Education and Normal People’s follow-up, Conversations with Friends, is Team Bean, intriguingly – stepping across the somewhat gendered picket line. “Things are much more sanitised and everyone is protecting their arses,” she said in April. “My view is that you don’t always have to be comfortable on a movie set as an actor. I don’t know where to draw the line but it’s definitely a blurry one.”

The very phrase “blurred lines” may set off considerable alarm bells – how to stop those blurring to problematic levels? James Franco, for instance, was accused of pressuring women to appear topless or nude, and of removing plastic guards on women's vaginas during sex scenes, on set of some of his independent films – allegations which are disputed. It needs to be within the power of actors, always, to stipulate their individual boundaries, and within the power of ICs to do the enforcing on their behalf.

Intimacy coordinators are clearly here to stay. But rather than obstructive sex cops, they’re better regarded as a resource actors can choose to use or to go without. If any party in a sex scene decides they need one as a safety net, it’s got to be their prerogative to have one there. But if Kirke and Bean agreed to throw caution to the wind, and the director of this woodshed tryst was game? That ought to be their right, too.