Florence Pugh shares her experience of working intimacy co-ordinators

by IANS |

Los Angeles, Nov 11 (IANS) Hollywood actress Florence Pugh has opened up about her experience of working with intimacy co-ordinators on film sets.

Intimacy coordinators have become an industry standard, although the job has proven divisive in Hollywood, reports ‘Variety’.

The actress appeared on the latest episode of ‘The Louis Theroux Podcast’, and described the profession as one that makes sure sex scenes are filmed with the utmost safety for the actors involved.

She said, “It’s not to get in the way. It’s not to confuse, it’s not to make things more complicated or make things more awkward. I’ve had good ones and bad ones”.

As per ‘Variety’, this is in stark contrast to what Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lawrence recently said about intimacy co-ordinators. Both the actresses made headlines recently for saying they didn’t feel the need to use the intimacy coordinators hired on their sets because they trusted their co-stars to be professional.

“We did not have (an intimacy coordinator), or maybe we did but we didn’t really (use it) I felt really safe with Rob (Pattinson). He is not pervy”, Lawrence said about the making of ‘Die My Love’.

Paltrow said on that the set of ‘Marty Supreme’ she told the intimacy coordinator to “step a little back” when she was filming intimate scenes with Timothee Chalamet, adding, “I don’t know how it is for kids who are starting out, but… if someone is like, ‘Okay, and then he’s going to put his hand here’, I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that”.

Pugh noted that she filmed many sex scenes without an intimacy coordinator in the past. While she’s always been “quite confident” and “quite happy in my skin”, the Oscar nominee remembered times when someone on set used “completely inappropriate” to direct a sex scene and there wasn’t an intimacy coordinator present to protect her.