Actor Sean Bean complained in a recent interview that professional intimacy coordinators ruin what could be very good sex scenes on film and in television — largely because they destroy any room for the actors to be spontaneous.
“It would inhibit me more because it’s drawing attention to things,” the “Game of Thrones” actor explained how having such a coordinator on the set could “spoil the spontaneity” of intimate scenes, according to a piece Variety published on Monday. “Somebody saying, ‘Do this, put your hands there, while you touch his thing … I think the natural way lovers behave would be ruined by someone bringing it right down to a technical exercise.”
Bean, who also played Boromir in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of “Lord of the Rings,” went on to compare his experience on “Game of Thrones” with a very different vibe on the set of the BBC’s miniseries “Lady Chatterley” — in which he starred opposite actress Joely Richardson.
“‘Lady Chatterly’ was spontaneous,” the actor told the U.K.’s Times Magazine. “It was a joy. We had a good chemistry between us, and we knew what we were doing was unusual. Because she was married, I was married. But we were following the story. We were trying to portray the truth of what DH Lawrence wrote.”
Adding an intimacy coordinator, he said he “should imagine it slows down the thrust of it … Ha, not the thrust, that’s the wrong word. It would spoil the spontaneity.”
And although Bean appeared to prefer scenes where the actors were allowed a little room for spontaneity, he conceded that also left room for things to go too far and risk censorship of the final product.
“I think they cut a bit out actually,” Bean said of a scene from the series “Snowpiercer” — in which he and actress Lena Hall apparently used a mango in an intimate scene. “Often the best work you do, where you’re trying to push the boundaries, and the very nature of it is experimental, gets censored when TV companies or the advertisers say it’s so much. It’s a nice scene, quite surreal, dream-like and abstract. And mango-esque,” he said, without giving any further details.
“I suppose it depends on the actress. This one [referring to Hall] had a musical cabaret background, so she was up for anything,” he added when the interviewer pointed out that an intimacy coordinator might protect actors from going too far in other ways in the age of #MeToo.