When is a kiss not just a kiss, and a sigh not just a sigh? When you’re an actor on a television set in the middle of a pandemic, expected to swap saliva and breathe passionately onto another human.
While so many people around the world were locked down in their homes, or avoiding intimate contact with anyone outside their bubbles, actors shooting television and movies over the last year were often faced with making tough decisions about what felt safe.
“Kissing is probably the most high-risk COVID-related activity a performer could engage in, so if anyone’s concerned about COVID, that’s the first thing to go,” according to Amanda Blumenthal, an intimacy coordinator who has worked on series like Euphoria, The Affair, and How to Get Away with Murder. “On occasion there are [actors] who are like, ‘I don’t feel comfortable kissing someone—they’re just a day player, I don’t know where they’ve been.’”
Intimacy coordination is a relatively new field that emerged in the wake of #MeToo, but the idea has caught on so quickly that Saturday Night Live recently mocked it in a Bridgerton intimacy coordinator skit featuring Regé-Jean Page himself. Sets can be high-pressure environments, and actors sometimes find themselves in distressing situations, their boundaries ignored. Intimacy coordinators are increasingly being brought on to find actors’ comfort zones and advocate for them, to liaise with directors and costume designers, and sometimes even to choreograph intimate scenes.
The pandemic added an extra dose of high anxiety to simulating sex on set, despite the strict COVID-19 protocols on shoots. “Kissing a stranger during a pandemic was terrifying, even though we were all tested,” Hacks star Hannah Einbinder admitted to Glamour in May.
Intimacy coordinator Marcus Watson was working on Netflix’s limited series Halston in March 2020 when productions around the globe shut down. “We were planning on filming a huge orgy scene the Friday that everything shut down, that March 13,” he says. When they resumed shooting in September, some explicit scenes had been rejigged—for instance, moving an indoor setting to the fresh air of the docks, where Halston (Ewan McGregor) goes cruising. And Watson made sure that all of the performers, including the background actors who were supposed to be making out on the periphery of several scenes, felt comfortable. For those actors hesitant to lock lips with a stranger, he proposed alternatives: “How do you feel about kisses on your neck or collarbone? You can show just as much lust or intimacy there as you can with a mouth-to-mouth kiss, and then we’re not having people exchanging saliva.”
Between scenes, Watson stood by with mouthwash and disinfecting wipes for people to swab themselves down. “If they’re feeling like, ‘Oh, I had someone slobber on my face and I’m worried to touch my face,’” he said, it could cripple their performance. “Their physical safety really affects their mental safety.” Watson has since worked on the forthcoming series The Gilded Age and the third season of Succession, where he was brought on for some simple kissing scenes—something that might not have required focused attention pre-pandemic. Producers, he tells me, “were now viewing a kiss as just as heightened a circumstance as a simulated sex scene.”
Some productions have gone even farther. On Mare of Easttown, stars Kate Winslet, Guy Pearce, Jean Smart, and Angourie Rice all shared a house while shooting on location in Pennsylvania. That allowed a level of vulnerability and intimacy otherwise hard to come by at the height of the pandemic. “That was the only show that I worked on that people were quarantining together,” says Alicia Rodis, who has served as the intimacy coordinator on many HBO series, including The Deuce, Insecure, and the upcoming limited series Scenes From a Marriage. (On the latter, production was temporarily shut down last fall due to a few positive COVID tests.)
On other sets, actors had to trust in the safety and testing protocols and in their fellow cast and crewmates’ willingness to follow the rules. “I was on some shows like Betty, where the crew was very vocal about saying, ‘We’re all in this together. We don’t want to get shut down, you know, we want to be working, so we’re all going to do the right thing.’”
Intimacy coordinators also quickly discovered that, in pandemic world, definitions of edgy behavior were turned inside out. Rodis marvels as she recalls a COVID officer (the person who oversees all safety procedures on set) explaining that a simulated oral sex scene they were preparing to work on was not nearly as dangerous as a scene of two people in a hallway shouting at each other. “Two people close to each other, yelling at each other, was actually more of a risk than an intimate scene where someone knelt down in front of someone.”
For U.K. intimacy coordination trailblazer Ita O’Brien, who’s worked on I May Destroy You, Sex Education, and Normal People, it’s strange consulting on sex scenes with people whose faces are largely hidden by masks. “You’re only seeing half a person,” she says, sadly. On the London set of Master of None’s new season, she adds, “They were really, really strict with PPE, so that was really challenging—not only did we wear the masks, but also [face] shields. You feel like you’re moving through fog when you try to communicate with your director and your actors.” This season, Master of None focused on a different kind of intimacy, as the character of Alicia (played by Naomi Ackie) ventures through artificial insemination and IVF treatment. Although the pandemic is not part of the plot, episodes feel stripped down and steeped in the tension of our current moment. “The underlying anxiety is there,” O’Brien says, onscreen and off.
For the last year, many of us have been trapped inside of a Zoom screen, starved of social and sensual interaction. That was also true for some actors, who embraced the wild burst of human contact that greeted them when they stepped on set. Teniece Divya Johnson, an intimacy coordinator who has worked on The Underground Railroad, West Side Story, and Pose, recalls the outpouring of “transformative energy” during the shooting of the new Starz series Run the World, which revolves around a group of friends in Harlem. “For the performers,” Johnson said, “this was the only place where they could be maskless and together.”
Within the safe space of the production, surrounded by PPE and regular COVID tests, they conjured an alternative universe without fear of airborne infection and breakthrough variants. “We’re depicting these women free and out in the world just as we’re all coming out of this time of tremendous upheaval and uncertainty,” Run the World creator Yvette Bowser recently told the Los Angeles Times. “I hope this show acts like an elixir for isolation: It inspires people to get out and get back to not just what feels normal, but also what is most fulfilling for their lives.”
Last year, a few television writers said they were eliminating explicit sex from scripts as much as possible. “There were certainly some productions that wrote out more intimate scenes or found ways to tell it where they implied it instead of actually performing it,” Rodis tells me.
Now that vaccines are widely available in the U.S., though, there’s a determination to return to business as usual. But some intimacy coordinators think that this moment has changed the entertainment industry for good—that the last year has made Hollywood much more flexible and willing to take actors’ feelings into account.
“Oftentimes we’ll hear boundaries used as a buzzword,” Johnson points out—one that wasn’t always taken seriously by directors and producers, who were more worried about getting a scene shot on time than they were about actors’ comfort zones. But COVID has made everyone prickly about their own personal boundaries: Will you go without a mask? Sit inside a bar? Get on a plane? Kiss a stranger? Thinking about boundaries and being able to express them is something that needs to be learned and practiced, Johnson argues. “A sentence like ‘they make love’ means something different to everyone in the room…. There has to be conversation.”
As more and more intimacy coordinators took their place on television and film sets during the pandemic, they dispelled the snarky notion that they were “the fun police,” as O’Brien puts it, with a chuckle. “To support beautiful, intimate content at a time where our nervous systems are going, Can we can we do this? It’s just been a joy.”
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