It’s noon on a Friday, and I am talking to strangers online about humping, manual stimulation and oral sex. So far, so Berlin. This is, after all, the home of loosey-goosey and boundary-pushing; it’s easy to imagine similar discussions taking place elsewhere in the city before the weekend’s shenanigans. What’s different about this discussion, though, is that these sex acts are, by definition, not going to happen.
Cathy Walsh, Frida Giulia Franceschini and Dani Brown are intimacy coordinators working on film and television shoots in Berlin and Brandenburg. If someone is humping in front of a camera, it’s up to them to ensure that although what’s happening is fake, looks realistic, is non-stimulating and remains – crucially – emotionally safe.
“If there’s a sex scene, and the director requires a certain action and the actor isn’t okay showing, say, lower body humping, there would be a conversation,” Franceschini explains. “If the actor is okay with depicting this action implicitly, maybe you just see the upper part of the body humping but not the lower part.”
“You could show the picture frame on the wall bouncing,” supplies Brown.
“There’s always a solution to tell the story without necessarily having to titillate the audience with explicit images,” says Franceschini. “[Being an intimacy coordinator] can be extremely hands-on and technical. Sometimes you have to spend your Friday evening trying to understand what’s the best recipe for a fake ejaculate, you know?”
Friends and artistic collaborators for over a decade, the trio, who originate from Italy (Franceschini), Ireland (Walsh) and the US (Brown), are all Berlin-based, with a background in dance, performance and choreography. Having trained as intimacy coordinators post-pandemic, they teamed up last year to form Mint Intimacy Coordination, and business is booming. Either together or separately, they are working across five film shoots between January and April, including Julian Dieterich’s The Melting Mood of Ecstasy and Anna Schimrigk’s Zu Wenig.
More coordination than intimacy
Trialling recipes for fake cum aside, the job of an intimacy coordinator (or IC) often involves a lot more coordination than it does intimacy. First off, an IC acts as a middleman between production, director and actor, flagging any sensitive areas of a script and conducting intake interviews with actors pre-production. In discussion with directors and performers, they make sure that the vision of the former (yes humping!) will work, given the boundaries or concerns of the latter (no humping!).
Detailed notes from this intake phase are sent to the legal department and turned into a nudity and consent rider, which forms part of an actor’s contract. Once shooting starts, the work of the intimacy coordinator turns a lot more, well, hands-on. Sex on screen, it turns out, is a smoke-and-mirrors act, and it’s an IC’s job to make sure that the sex and intimacy looks as realistic as possible on screen, while remaining as artificial as possible on set.
“It’s choreography,” says Franceschini. “On most sets, [sex] is simulated. Of course, there are also sets where it’s non-simulated, like new adult industry or porn, and even there, intimacy coordinators can be brought in. But most of the time, you fake it. You work with anchoring, for example. If you want to see someone’s head in between someone’s leg, that head is not gonna put any pressure on the genitals. You’re gonna, like, anchor to the side of the thigh” – she mimes pushing her head into an imaginary leg – “and move in a way that looks realistic from wherever the camera is, but in fact, it’s not even close to the genitals.”
Keeping those genitals pressure-free may also involve a complicated set of kit. All three experts make sure that when it comes to showing penetrative sex on screen, nobody feels a thing. Walsh talks me through her box of tricks: tape and pouches of all sizes and skin colours, padding from bras stuffed into underpants, C-strings (like a G-string, but with no sides).
“Between genitals, you’re always trying to have three barriers so there’s coverage on each person and then something in between. If you’re going to have the movement of penetration, you want space so that people are not getting embarrassed or overwhelmed or excited. We’ll often use things like a Pilates ball, which you can either blow up or deflate depending on the position, so people really have some cushioning there,“ she says. “Sometimes we cut up yoga mats and cover it with the same material as a bedsheet so that if the camera catches it, then it’s well disguised.”
But all three are adamant that the most important elements of an IC’s toolbox are planning and transparency. “It’s this play between vulnerability and armour all the time. That’s an actor’s world,” says Walsh. “What can I put on myself in terms of makeup, costuming or protective garments that make me feel like I can be on stage or in front of the camera and be vulnerable as an actor? You have to put things in place in order to really go somewhere emotionally and physically, and that’s all about the preparation.”
A complex role
Brown describes a scene in an upcoming film that Mint are working on: “We have a few scenes with group snuggling among very close friends. Imagine they have to lie there for quite a while because lighting has to be adjusted. In this case, it’s not a sexually explicit scene whatsoever, but they will have barriers, just to avoid any unwanted vasodilation.”
That’s an unwanted erection to you and me; talking to intimacy coordinators is a crash course in biology and physiology, as everything is given its proper name. “We’re trying to desexualise our language so that it’s more appropriate for the workplace, to take it out of that social space where sex is most often talked about, within the bedroom context or titillation,” Walsh says. Blow jobs and horny are out; activation and vasodilation are in. But she draws the line at ‘intergluteal cleft’ as a substitute for butt crack. “If it gets too clinical, I don’t think it helps the relationship or the work.”
But back to that cuddling friend group and their unwanted vasodilation. For Franceschini, what’s important is not just barriers, but communication: “Nobody wants to talk about it, but it’s important. It’s something we talk about in the one-on-one: ‘Okay, you’re going to be there for a while. If that happens, you’re going to look at me or say a safe word, and I’m going to stop the action and we’ll do push-ups for two minutes. We all have bodies, we get stimulated, it happens. We have to have a solution for that.”
Sometimes though, the support or cushioning required is not of a physical nature. On set, intimacy coordinators play a complex role: part intermediary, part mental health coach, part choreographer. An actor who is about to play a scene of sexual assault might be advised to tag-in and tag-out (think double high-fives) with the actor who will play their aggressor. Each scene will be broken down into beats and movements, so an actor doesn’t have to think about what their hands should be doing or where their leg is.
“We use this phrase: the journey of the penis or the journey of the finger,” says Walsh, laughing. “You know, make it look as real as possible. A hand shouldn’t be just hanging around in space.”
Afterwards, an intimacy coordinator might offer a quick session of bodywork or breathwork in order to do what Brown refers to as “de-role”. “We really advocate that a scene like that can’t be done under time pressure. There needs to be space for performers or crew to say ‘Hey, we need a break.’”
Recently, she worked with a young and inexperienced actor who was struggling with a sex scene. What felt intuitive to him didn’t look good on screen. “He kept saying, ‘I don’t feel it,’” she recalls. “Eventually, I took him aside and said, ‘Look, in terms of the mental experience, it’s better if it doesn’t feel real. What’s most important is that it looks real.’”
Changing a culture
Twenty years ago, even 10 years ago, the role of intimacy coordinator didn’t exist. Actors would arrive on set in the morning and if a scene called for explicit sex, sexual assault or child birth, then off to the races they’d go. What could be done to whom by who, and what would end up on screen, was often decided on the day, in a sea of uneven power dynamics. From outright sexual assault to situations in which a young actor might be unwilling to say no to an influential director only to feel deep unease in the aftermath, stories of the deeply problematic nature of on-screen sex scenes are legion.
Sometimes you have to spend your Friday evening trying to understand what’s the best recipe for a fake ejaculate, you know?
Director Bernardo Bertolucci and actor Marlon Brando ambushed 19-year-old Maria Schneider during a rape scene in Last Tango in Paris to ensure her reaction was ‘authentic’. “During the scene,” Schneider said years later, “even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears.” Rupert Grint described filming the graphic scenes in Cherrybomb in front of 12 male crew as, “a traumatic experience”. Remembering filming scenes of sex and violence on the Big Little Lies shoot, Nicole Kidman admitted, “I felt very exposed and vulnerable and deeply humiliated at times.”
Although early pioneers of intimacy coordination, such as UK-based Ita O’Brien, were working to address experiences such as these since the early 2000s, the job was really invented in the wake of 2017’s #MeToo movement, when disclosures about producer Harvey Weinstein unleashed a flood of terrible on-set stories. Hollywood’s open secret was not so secret any more, and somewhat cynically, production studios grew anxious about potential lawsuits.
Engaging an intimacy coordinator is now par for the course when filming in the US and much of the English-speaking world. While not legally mandatory, it’s required by SAG-AFTRA, the influential American film industry union, and by many studios and streaming platforms working with European production companies.
Somewhat inevitably, the ubiquity of the role has resulted in a backlash, with actors such as Gwyneth Paltrow saying she refused to work with one on Marty Supreme (“I would feel stifled”), Jennifer Lawrence saying the IC provided on Die My Love was unnecessary because Robert Pattison “is not pervy” and Mikey Madison turning one down when shooting Anora, on the basis that her character was a sex worker and she herself was an actress (“I just approached it as a job”).
“After #MeToo, the first intimacy coordinators on set had to be disruptive because they had to change a culture. I’m very grateful that they did that, but I wouldn’t say I’m that kind of intimacy coordinator,” says Franceschini, pointing out that experienced actors will have what she describes as, “a different toolbox inside of them,” compared to a newcomer or non-actor.
“It’s important to understand who’s in front of you. I’m happy to remind an actor that there are strategies to de-role and de-stress from something heightened like a sexual assault scene, but at the same time, I also have to respect that they’re professionals and they have agency. We have to use a lot of intuition to be caring, but also not overstepping.”
It’s not the same thing
In Germany, a further layer of complexity is added by the fact that the job description is relatively unknown and often confused with that of an intimacy coach.
“Which is an actual job,” Walsh points out. “But they work mostly with couples with intimacy issues, whereas we’re facilitating what looks like intimacy, but we’re trying to make it more choreographed and less intimate.”
There’s always a solution to tell the story without necessarily having to titillate the audience with explicit images.
“For me as a foreigner, it’s very interesting,” says Brown. “I find Germany as a culture is very risk averse. Everyone has five different insurances. But then in film, it’s a big Wild West. Netflix, Paramount, Disney come here as production partners working with German production companies. On Netflix productions, for example, intimacy coordination is obligatory. But the German production companies sometimes have no idea what an intimacy coordinator does or how to work with us.
“Often production companies use this term ‘intimacy coach’, which is a person who just shows up on the day. But we’re not trained like that. We’re trained as coordinators to manage the paperwork and the interdepartmental communication. We can’t guarantee that nothing will happen, but we do all this work to avoid risk.”
Just before I leave our video call, I ask Walsh which elements of a sex scene most actors tend to find most difficult. Intimacy coordinators, it seems to me, could have a fairly unique insight into the hang-ups many of us keep secret.
“The thing that’s kind of surprising is that kissing is one of the most difficult things for people to do because it’s a non-simulated sexual act… As much as I try to choreograph it and make it easily repeatable, the body doesn’t know that you’re acting. For the body, it’s real.”
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