When the clothes fly off, this intimacy coordinator steps in

‘Transforming Spaces’ is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.

It takes a lot of people to make a movie. You have the director for the overall image, the lighting maker, the decorators to add texture to the world of the movie, and the costume designers to imagine the looks of the actors.

What if those costumes come off and things start to get a little silly? That’s where Jessica Steinrock comes in.

Ms. Steinrock is an intimacy coordinator—or intimacy director, if she’s working on theater and live performance—that allows for the production of scenes involving nudity, simulated sex, or hyperexposure, which she describes as “something someone else wouldn’t discover in public, even if it’s not legal nudity.” Like a stunt coordinator or a fight director, she makes sure the actors are safe throughout the process and the scene looks believable.

The role has come to prominence over the past five years. As the entertainment industry reeled from the litany of abuses exposed by the #MeToo movement, many productions were eager to publicly demonstrate their commitment to safety. Hiring an intimacy coordinator was one way to do that.

“A lot of places were really excited about the possibility of this work and leading the way — showing that their company cared about their actors, cared about permission,” Ms. Steinrock said in a Zoom interview from her Chicago home.

Mrs. Steinrock — who has worked on projects including the critically acclaimed survival drama Showtime “Yellowjackets,” Netflix’s teen drama “Never Have I Ever,” and the Hulu miniseries “Little Fires Everywhere” — has been involved in intimacy coordination from the very beginning. The industry boomed thanks to the widely published work from the intimacy coordinator Alicia Rodis on the HBO show “The Deuce” in 2018. At the time, Ms. Steinrock, whose background is in improvisational comedy, was working toward a master’s degree in theater from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, focused on navigating the permission questions in that space.

“In the improv world, I was picked up or kissed or grabbed a lot, or jokes were made about me that I didn’t agree with,” she says. recalled in a TikTok video. “And I was really curious if there were ways to better navigate that.”

The problem was especially thorny in improvisation, which is based on a philosophy of accepting and building on whatever your scene partner gives you.

“You’ve been put in these uncomfortable or even harmful positions because the whole culture is ‘yes, and…’,” said Valleri Robinson, the head of the university’s theater department, who advised Ms. Steinrock on her master’s degree and Ph.D. . “It really started to come to the fore for her that this was a problematic way of making art.”

Mrs. Steinrock and Mrs. Rodis met through Mrs. Steinrock’s then boyfriend, now husband, who is a fight director. Ms. Rodis recognized a kindred spirit, with all the makings of a great intimacy coordinator, in Ms. Steinrock. She accompanied Mrs. Steinrock on her first appearance: a 40-person orgy on the TNT show “Claws.” “She was thrown into the lion’s den and she absolutely smashed it,” recalled Ms. Rhodes himself.

Ms. Steinrock quickly rose to become a leader in the fast-growing field, and she now spends much of her time educating people about it. In April 2022, she started her TikTok bill, which now has more than 700,000 followers. In her videos she criticizes ‘spicy’ scenes television shows (her current favourites include “Bridgerton”, “Sex Education” and “House of the Dragon”); collapses how such scenes are filmed; and answers common questions about her work, such as “What do you do when an actor gets an erection?” or “If two actors are in an offscreen relationship, do they still have to follow the same protocols?” She not only demystifies her job, but also involves people broader conversations about intimacy and consent.

The role of the intimacy coordinator can be a tricky balancing act between choreography and caregiving, and Ms. Steinrock brings to the work an academic foundation in feminist and performance theory coupled with innate social skills.

“She’s very patient,” says Karyn Kusama, a director and executive producer of the Showtime drama “Yellowjackets,” who worked with Ms. Steinrock on the show’s pilot. “She’s listening. She’s looking to the actor to take the lead in terms of… making them feel most cared for.

The “Yellowjackets” pilot features several intimate scenes, including one in which two high school students, played by Sophie Nélisse and Jack Depew, have sex in a car, and another in which a housewife, played by Melanie Lynskey, masturbates. It was essential that Ms. Steinrock was on set for those scenes, Ms. Kusama said.

As a director, Ms. Kusama said she has always felt a deep empathy with how vulnerable actors are in these scenes and she does everything she can to check in. But even when she asks a question, it can be difficult for an actor who feels uncomfortable to answer honestly knowing how much is at stake. As a neutral party, an intimacy coordinator is more likely to receive an honest answer.

“Societally, sex is very hard to talk about,” Ms. Steinrock said. Her role is to “create more communication paths,” she explained, so that the actors feel safe to discuss any issues, big or small, that may arise.

Not only does having an intimacy coordinator create a safer environment, Ms Kusama said, it also makes for better, sexier art.

“It requires you to take responsibility for your story with the actors, to really say yes, we are portraying sex and this is what it should mean – that is, it should mean something,” she said. “And conversely, I can say to an intimacy coordinator, ‘You know, it feels like I’m watching two people peck each other on the cheek, and there’s no warmth here.'”

This is where the choreography piece of Ms. Steinrock’s work comes in: She can offer ways to use breath or adjust positions to make a scene more suggestive.

In just five years, intimacy coordinators have become an essential part of the entertainment industry. HBO has required them for all their productions since 2019 (Ms. Rodis oversees their program). At the moment, Ms. Kusama said, it’s hard for her to imagine signing up for a project with intimate scenes without it.

The discipline’s explosive growth has led coordinators to create standards in real time, such as building the rails of a roller coaster as it rockets into the air. “We first need to define this role and agree on what it is,” Ms. Steinrock said. “That is step 1 of building a new profession. And then we have to define what being qualified for that role looks like.”

In 2020, Ms. Steinrock, Ms. Rodis and another intimacy director, Marie Percy, formed Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, with Mrs. Steinrock at the helm. She had never been CEO, but she taught herself on the job, quickly growing IDC into the leading training and accreditation organization in the field. The four-level program includes a mix of virtual and in-person classes. It is the only organization to offer certification in both intimacy coordination and directing, and it also hosts workshops for other artistic professionals, such as actors or directors, who want to integrate these practices into their work.

“Jessica created the accountability structures so we can say, ‘This is what our certification means. Here’s all the teaching behind it. Here’s the fair practices we have, and here’s the responsibility we have towards these artists,’” Ms. Rodis said.

Ms. Steinrock sees advocacy for these standards as an important part of IDC’s mission. She was part of a working group organized by the Screen Actors Guild to establish new safety standards for intimacy published in 2020; in 2022 the union launched a register of vetted intimacy coordinators and announced that it would happen creating a pathway to union membership for these professionals.

“Intimacy coordinators are not a panacea for an industry that has historically abused its actors — and, frankly, has historically abused most of the people in it,” Ms. Steinrock said. But integrating it into productions is a clear step that institutions can take, as part of a broader pursuit of security and justice.

On Ms. Steinrock’s part, that commitment includes working to diversify intimacy coordination. While it’s a rare female-led discipline in an industry dominated by men, it’s still predominantly white and straight—one of the pitfalls of a young profession that relies largely on word of mouth to grow.

Ultimately, the hope is that intimacy coordination becomes standard in the entertainment industry, and “that it helps us see each other and the role of sex in our lives differently, as something richer and with more possibilities,” Ms. Kusama said.

Ms. Robinson is delighted to see her former student bring these issues out. “She improves our vocabulary and gives us ways outside of the industry to tackle these topics that people find so difficult,” she said. And while much of that awareness has happened through TikTok, Ms. Robinson noticed that too Ms. Steinrock’s dissertation was downloaded over 700 times – another sign of how much interest there is in this area.

Inviting people to re-examine how sex works in the media they consume, Ms Steinrock said, could improve the way they approach sex in general.

“Media is the first experience of intimacy for so many people,” she said. “And when we care about how things are made, it starts conversations about how things work in other spaces, and I think that can have a huge impact on what people expect in their day-to-day lives.”