I’m an Intimacy Coordinator – How Hollywood Sex Scenes Are Really Made
FOR TV fans, a good sex scene is one you can’t look away from and maybe should have watched alone. But for intimacy coordinators, it’s all in a day’s work.
Jessica Steinrock, who coordinated scenes for shows like Yellowjackets and Little Fires Everywhere, said it takes a lot of technical know-how to pull off these interludes down to the last detail.
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‘Intimacy coordinator’ is a fairly new position in Hollywood, but Steinrock, 29, from Chicago, told The US Sun that much of the work they do already existed.
Directors have long choreographed sex scenes to make them look exciting and real, since unsimulated sex violates SAG-AFTRA union rules.
Costume departments have handed out modest garments so actors can act faux-eccentric without unnecessary touching, and to avoid awkward — er, awkward — problems.
But since about 2018, consent has also become central, and people like Steinrock have been hired to monitor all the moving parts.
Steinrock, who also worked on Never Have I Ever, has become one of the biggest names in her field after being there from the beginning.
She’s certainly had some remarkable experiences, like when she was in charge of a 40-person sex party on the set of Claws on her very first day as an intimacy coordinator.
“It was just the most intense work day ever,” she admitted.
“I thought, great! This is the job I signed up for, that’s for sure. It was so much fun. What an amazing set. What an amazing experience.”
Now she has 783,000 followers on TikTokwhere she shares tricks of the trade, including different types of modest garments – think strapless thongsnipple covers and silicone cups for the genitals.
She also talks about her own favorite on-screen sex scenes — and her least favorite, like in a certain Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde film.
FIVE PILLARS OF INTIMACY
Steinrock found her way into sex scenes through improvisation, where she was used to people grabbing, kissing and licking her, but where she wanted to maintain her boundaries and personal autonomy.
After working with two of the greatest pioneers of intimacy work, Tonia Sina and Alicia Rodis, Steinrock has teamed up with others Intimacy Directors and Coordinators and now trains others for this work.
In each production she focuses on the five pillars of intimacy: context, consent, communication, choreography and closure.
“We start with: What’s the story? What’s the context? Are we all on the same page?” she said.
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“Because if one thinks it’s a little kiss and the other thinks it’s a joke, then we have a little challenge.
“[Then] We create communication paths, we know how to take breaks, we know how to talk about the characters, we talk about our boundaries.
“We talked about consent so everyone knows exactly what’s going to happen.
Our bodies are actually very bad at distinguishing between real and imaginary. Our brains are fine with it, but our bodies are not.
Jessica Steinrock
“Then consent and choreography go hand in hand.
“Choreography is mainly about making the story look good, but also about giving us a guideline so we can agree on what’s going to happen to our bodies.
“And at the end of the day, we work with something called closing, which is just a tool to help actors move past the emotional work that they do.”
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They do this so that they don’t “accidentally fall in love” – see Brangelina, or Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson – or take home “some trauma or emotional burden” from the story.
“Our bodies are actually very bad at distinguishing between real and imaginary. Our brains are fine with it, but our bodies are not.”
A LITTLE BIT OF MODESTY
And then there are the technical aspects, such as dealing with nudity and contact.
“The guideline I generally follow is that if we don’t see something on camera, we have to cover it up,” Steinrock said.
That’s where modest garments come in. They’ve come a long way since costume designers had to make something ‘Frankenstein’.
Steinrock remembers how a friend once made a genital barrier out of a fluffy dinosaur suit.
“Can you imagine doing a sex scene and knowing that there’s a dinosaur suit strapped to your crotch? How vulnerable can you be?” she said.
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Today, there are companies making custom-designed items for upwards of $60 apiece, including nude strapless thongs with built-in padding that are held in place with matching tape.
There are also silicone nipple covers and genital barriersthicker pieces that reduce the extent to which the actors can feel.
That can help reduce awkward moments when a male actor becomes aroused – which Steinrock says happens less often than people think, but is a lot less serious. do to happen.
We don’t have to say, ‘Oh, I have a vascular reaction!’
Jessica Steinrock
“You know, anyone with a penis is going to have some sort of vascular response,” she said.
“But because we have barriers – the soft padding that goes between the actors’ genitals, and more often than not they’re both wearing some kind of barrier – if there’s a vascular reaction, we can just take a break.”
Actors on her sets can indicate at any time that they need a break without having to say why, so they don’t have to worry about embarrassment.
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“We don’t have to say, ‘Oh, I’m having a vascular reaction!’ We’re not going to do that,” she said.
Other concerns include actors worrying about their breath — she has peppermints for that — or worry about a visible tampon string or menstrual spots, although she says that is rare.
RESPECT BOUNDARIES
Much of her work is emotional, playing on the nerves and feelings of actors.
She has shared examples on social media, including how a young star can be nervous about doing a sex scene if she… never had sex in real life.
And it’s not just the actors’ feelings that are taken into account: Steinrock also ensures that crew members, such as cameramen, feel comfortable with what they see.
We do all this to ensure that sex scenes not only look fun, but also that no one is left with regrets.
Jessica Steinrock’s Favorite and Least Favorite Sex Scenes
Even though Jessica Steinrock knows how to make sausage, she still enjoys sex scenes on TV.
One of her recent favorites is Netflix’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a “beautiful” film with “wonderful” intimate work.
She is also a fan of Bridgerton and described the second season of The Deuce as “iconic.”
But it’s more likely that she’ll notice a sex scene that just doesn’t seem right and that bothers her.
One of these was an oral sex scene in Don’t Worry Darling between Harry Styles and Florence Pugh.
“I didn’t like that scene,” she said, describing it as “unrealistic.”
She also recalled a scene from Orange is the New Black where a woman was bent over a table and the man behind her held his shirt open around her butt.
“The shirt covered where you know the penetration would have otherwise occurred. But in my head I thought, ‘No one would hold their shirt like that,'” she said.
On TikTok she said a scene in The Orville was “the worst thing” she had ever seen.
“There are a lot of clichés in Hollywood about: if you don’t do it, there are 100 people who will.
“You either audition all the time, or you make sure you’re not the one slowing down the process.
“And it really comes down to saying yes and agreeing to whatever is going to happen to you.
“And you have no boundaries, and it puts the people in power — even the people with the best intentions — in a position where coercion can still happen.”
Intimacy coordinators ensure that these boundaries are adhered to, even if there is resistance.
“I always approach this from an empathetic perspective, because when they resist something, they are actually protecting something,” Steinrock explains.
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“And so I think, well, what are they trying to protect? Are they trying to protect their artistry that they’ve spent 30 years creating?
“Are they trying to protect their sense of personhood now that they’re entering a new discipline and maybe they’re 18 years old and doing a sex scene for the first time?
“Are they trying to protect the film project that they just got hired to direct, that they’re so passionate about and want to see their name on and say, ‘That’s my piece’? I can have empathy for all of those things and work with all of those things.”
Just a few years ago, such conversations weren’t commonplace on Hollywood sets, but Steinrock notes how much has changed and how far the industry still has to go.
“The language around consent and intimacy is significantly different today than it was 45 years ago,” she said.
“Consent had a very different connotation. It was, when we talk about consent, it was either you’re attacked or it’s okay. There was no middle ground.
“But consent can really only be about hugs or shoulder touches.
“There is a difference in language, skills, and the ease with which I see emerging generations having conversations about boundaries and consent around sex.
“It gives me hope for a future where we can talk about this more freely and where there is less stigma attached to it, and that will ultimately, I think, lead to better stories.”
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