Currently available to stream on Starz, Three Women is based on Lisa Taddeo's New York Times bestselling non-fiction book. The series follows Sloane, Lina, and Maggie as they explore their sexuality and discover what they want out of intimate relationships. Despite the title, the trio are not the only female characters the show centers on. Shailene Woodley's Gia is a writer who persuades the women to tell their stories and is loosely based on Taddeo, herself.
✕ Remove Ads An Intimate Scene Is A Specialized Piece Of Storytelling, Says Warden "I think there's a lack of understanding of the demand on the actors that an intimate or nude scene has." You were an actor before you were an intimacy coordinator, so what inspired you to pursue a new type of role in the industry?
Claire Warden: That's a good question. I think that one of the biggest misconceptions from people outside of the industry is just what it's like to film an intimate or a nude scene and what actually happens, how long it takes, and how many people are involved. As an audience member, you sit and watch a two-minute scene in which you see flashes of someone's body and something that looks a lot like sex.
Claire Warden: I think what's so wonderful about Three Women is that each of the, in fact, the four women, because we also have Gia as a character as well, is that the journeys that we see are so interwoven with their history and experience of intimacy and of sex. It's part of the story as opposed to a scene that's just kind of thrown in there occasionally for titillation or just because,"Oh, and they also do this thing.
Claire Warden: What was so wonderful about the team, our showrunner, Laura Eason, and Lisa Taddeo, our writer, as well as all of our directors and DPs who were all female, was the conversations we had right at the beginning. They brought me in at the beginning for the creative conversations because it was clear that the track or the arc of the intimate stories had to be so specific and so tailored to these people.
Claire Warden: Yes, it is scary sometimes be vulnerable. I think what also adds to the fear is that all of these actors have been, up until now, working in a system that is not set up to make space for their agency, their consent, and their input into what's done to their body and how it's seen. In fact, it's a system that's actively set against that, to not allow that, to shut that down.
And what matters about the story is not often like,"We have to see this part of the body or the whole season doesn't make sense." It's like in this moment when Aidan places his hand there on Lina and the experience she has—that's what we need to see. So we get really focused on,"What's the story here?" We can tell that in so many ways. How we benefit the story is allowing the actors to be fully resourced and free to tell the story.
Because if we discount that, we're discounting the truth of Maggie's life experience, and we're also not making a space for the hundreds of people that have been in that situation to really be seen that it wasn't black and white, it wasn't jumping out of a dark alley, and you had no idea. It's very complex in those kind of emotionally manipulative, coercive situations.
And so we have to craft it really specifically in a way that's sustainable for them to do that often. Whereas on film, we'll have a number of takes, and we'll have a couple of setups, but once you've shot that film, that scene, that's it. You never go back to it. It's disappeared into the ether, and we never revisit it, so it's a different kind of container for the storytelling. A big consideration is where the audience is watching from.