, most of the sex scenes that have caught viewers’ imaginations and fired up conversations on social media in recent years have been O’Brien’s work.
While an intimacy coordinator’s role is reasonably self-explanatory as both an advocate for the actors and an aid in realising the director’s vision for any intimate content in a safe but creatively satisfying way , there are also a fair few misconceptions floating around. O’Brien researches ahead of starting on each of her projects, such as Gentleman Jack, just like actors
‘That was a statement that used to happen before Weinstein: If you’re an actor, that’s your job. You’re expected to be naked, you’re expected to perform sexual content. And if you’re a good actor, that’s what you’ll do.’ ‘Asking them to explore any degree of simulated sexual content or degrees of their nakedness and degrees of touch, when it’s not done well, without agreement and consent, then injury can be physical – but it also can be emotional and psychological. And that injury actually has way more far-reaching effects than perhaps hurting an ankle.’
‘If you talk about your life being guided, all those different things that have brought me to this point, the fact that I happened to have been working on it, the fact that Meredith Dufton happened to ask me to come in and start teaching it [at Mountview] – all of those things just were put in place – and that I happened to have already shared the work [with agents] in June of 2017.’