Intimacy

Intimacy

Chapter One

The Mirror

Why What We See On-Screen Matters

Making realistic art matters. When Shakespeare’s Hamlet tells the troupe of players that they need to hold a mirror up to nature, he is describing the role that theater, books, and films have had in our lives since time immemorial. Art looks at the dilemmas that humankind faces and invites us to see ourselves.

As an increasingly screen-­based society, our screens (and our stages) become a reflecting glass. If the intimate content we see is unrealistic, separated from its emotional narrative, then it is telling us a lie about ourselves. It’s making us less honest, less open. It is in danger of making us behave in ways that are destructive to ourselves and our relationships. If what we see is complex, truthful, and challenging, then the entertainment industry can help society understand itself better.

People are often turned off by the sex they see onscreen, not because it is explicit but because it isn’t real. All that bumping and grinding, the thrusting and heads thrown back in simulated ecstasy rarely bears much relationship to people’s own experience of their sexual encounters. Yet, if you think back to the films you watched when you were growing up, then you might notice that they have conditioned what you now expect in your intimate life.

In explicit sexual scenes, we nearly always see spontaneous penetration after perhaps 30 seconds of kissing. Is that how it happens in your life? No! Certainly not for anyone I know. Men take time to get erect; women need to open like a flower and certainly some form of lubrication. You might argue that it doesn’t matter, that what we see onscreen is fiction and it doesn’t affect what happens in real life. But it does.

First-­time lovemaking and the loss of virginity is nearly always glamorized, as in Gossip Girl, or romanticized, as in The Notebook. The reason the scene between Connell and Marianne in Normal People hit home so strongly is because that type of naturalism is so rare. It comes so much closer to many people’s first experience of sex, yet it isn’t depicted that way onscreen.

These media portrayals matter. Productions can set a tone for a whole cultural moment. If you happened to be going to cinemas in the 1990s, there was an entire genre of hugely popular films in which women were essentially bought. The charm of Julia Roberts’s performance in Pretty Woman disguised the fact that she was a sex worker being paid for her time by a rich man. The box-­office charisma of Robert Redford somehow made the premise of Indecent Proposal—­that it was OK for a man to offer a stranger a million dollars for a night with his wife—­acceptable.

Onscreen, women are often depicted as being cajoled into sex, as if that is a normal way to behave, or enjoying sex after it has been forced upon them, which goes beyond abnormal into dangerous. They are rarely depicted as initiating sex, which creates the illusion that men always need to draw them into a sexual encounter for sex to happen.

But the issue is greater than individual films. Because the people literally calling the shots as the directors and cinematographers are mostly men (and it’s worth noting that as of 2025, it was still the case that a woman hadn’t won the best cinematography Oscar), a subsection of the population has shaped how the whole of society views women, men, and the sexual relations between them. Hollywood has gendered the shot design of films, so that women and men are consistently portrayed differently onscreen.

The feminist filmmaker Nina Menkes explores this brilliantly in her film documentary Brainwashed: Sex-­Camera-­Power. At its simplest, the shot design of most films perpetuates the notion that women are passive creatures, longing to be looked at, whereas men are invariably in positions of power. Women are often shot two-­dimensionally, surrounded by ethereal lighting, not anchored in the environment but somehow floating in some ageless netherworld. There is no sense of a woman being grounded in reality in many films. The men, in contrast, are shown in full, rounded 3-­D. It doesn’t matter if the result is a great film or a pile of shlock, the basic grammar of cinema is reinforcing the sense that women are objects of desire, sitting or lying around and looking beautiful, while men are active beings, always ready to do something.

I was on the set of a film where the scene was meant to be one where the woman, as protagonist, told her husband something of vital importance. Yet the director—­unconsciously, I think—­put the woman in profile while the husband was full face on. I was watching the filming on the monitor, sitting next to the female writer of the script. She kept saying, under her breath, “Make her the protagonist.” Yet the director seemed entirely unaware of what he was doing. The scene had been written to show the woman’s point of view; it was shot to reflect the man’s.

This conscious or unconscious viewpoint permeates the fabric of our thinking. It is the default glass through which we see the world. When I was doing my MA in Movement Studies, one of our tutors shared an exercise with us as students in which we explored the fundamental mindset of masculine and feminine. A chair was set in the center of the room, and we were asked to walk in and sit in it. When we were in a masculine mode, the entire thought pattern was about taking up space, looking for where the exits were, weighing up the dangers. The body language revealed someone powerful and in charge.

For the feminine mindset, we were to walk in and arrange ourselves, shaping our body into beautiful curves, diagonal lines, ready to be looked at, to receive admiration and incite desire. This always enraged me; I never saw why I should accept that this helplessness was a natural quality of being womanly. Nevertheless, for an actor, it is a truthful reflection of how women are seen and quite often how they behave in film and TV scripts.

The trouble is that the screen image of a dominant man and a submissive woman reinforces and creates inequalities. It limits our ability to see ourselves and each other occupying spaces outside of those roles. Beyond that, Hollywood’s glamorization of sexual assault has had a chilling effect offscreen. It both reflects what is happening in the real world and also suggests it is normal. All of which means that we have to be serious and careful when it comes to intimate content.

Since the start of storytelling on-­screen, intimate content has been treated as an improvisation exercise, one where actors are simply required to get on with it. Actors would never be asked to make up a fight scene, because they weren’t experienced fight directors, or to choreograph a tango when they knew nothing about dance. Yet they’d consistently been asked to make up sex scenes because it’s assumed we all know what to do when it comes to sex. That has led to abuse and trauma. It has damaged actors’ creativity and their ability to perform, and indeed is still occurring. In May 2024, Denise Gough, who won an Olivier award for her role in People, Places and Things, called on those in positions of power in the industry to become “allies for colleagues” and noted that we are in “an industry where misconduct remains rife.”

All too often, before I created the Intimacy on Set Guidelines (which I will talk about later) to formalize best practices in the industry when working with scenes involving intimacy, simulated sex and nudity, a kind of chaos reigned.

In recent times, some of the most prolonged and extensive sex scenes that have been televised came in the sensationally popular Game of Thrones. Yet, Gemma Whelan, one of the stars, described the multiple intimate scenes as a “frenzied mess.” “They used to say, when we shout action, just go for it . . . A director might say, ‘Bit of boob biting, then slap her bum and go . . .‘ ” What seems “sexy” onscreen can feel anything but for the people involved.

On 6 June 2021, the actor and writer Michaela Coel made a speech that drew attention to the difference that intimacy coordination can make, as she collected a BAFTA award for the best actress for her groundbreaking series, I May Destroy You. Out of the blue, and to my great astonishment and pride, she dedicated the award to me.

Thank you for your existence in our industry, for making the space safe, for creating physical, emotional, and professional boundaries so that we can make work about exploitation, loss of respect, about abuse of power, without being exploited or abused in the process. I know what it is like to shoot without an intimacy director—­the messy, embarrassing feeling for the crew, the internal devastation for the actor. Your direction was essential to my show, and I believe essential for every production company that wants to make work exploring themes of consent.