Superstar Emma Thompson blasted the idea of not using “intimacy coordinators” for sex scenes in movies and TV and said “you can’t just let it flow.”
During the 63-year-old actress’ appearance on the “Fitzy and Wippa” radio show, Thompson said using intimacy coordinators is important to make people on set “feel safe” because doing them is “not a comfortable situation,” the Hollywood Reporter reported in a piece published Monday.
“Intimacy coordinators are fantastically important,” the “Cruella” star shared. “I don’t know [if] you were speaking to somebody who found it distracting, but another conversation you might find [is] that people go, ‘It made me comfortable. It made me feel safe. It made me feel as though I was able to do this work.'”
“No, you can’t just let it flow,” she added. “The crew is — [you’re] not on your own in a hotel room. You’re being hounded by a bunch of blokes … carrying things.”
“So I don’t know who the actor was, but maybe he had an intimacy coordinator accidentally at home,” she said.
“Game Of Thrones” star Sean Bean recently said intimacy coordinators could “spoil the spontaneity” of sex scenes and would “inhibit me more because it’s drawing attention to things,” as The Daily Wire previously reported.
“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,” the “Lord Of The Rings” star shared.
Thompson’s comments appeared to go further than Bean’s “Snowpiercer” co-star Lena Hall’s, who said that she didn’t believe intimacy coordinators were necessary if she feels “comfortable with my scene partner and with others in the room,” but would call on one if she felt “weird, gross or overexposed,” as reported.
“I will either challenge the necessity of the scene or I’ll want an IC,” Hall explained. “I feel that when an actor has to do a scene that is extremely emotional (like committing suicide or being raped) there needs be some kind of mental health person available to talk to post-shoot. Even though we are only acting, we are still experiencing trauma.”
“Sometimes you need em sometimes you don’t but every single person and scene and experience is different,” the actress concluded.