Emily Berrington was overjoyed when she received the call from her agent. She’d got the part. And it was an exciting one: a role in Close to the Enemy, a BBC miniseries set in the 1940s, written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff. It was 2015 and Berrington was told in writing that there would be some nudity, which she was OK with in principle, as long as all the details were straightened out in advance.
But she says alarm bells began ringing when Poliakoff wouldn’t agree to contractually stipulate the exact requirements of Berrington’s nude scenes before filming began. However, Berrington was optimistic they’d be able to work something out, so she requested a phone call with Poliakoff. When they spoke, Berrington asked him how long she’d be nude for, what the lighting would be like and whether she’d be able to choose which specific parts of her body would be seen.
Poliakoff lost his temper, Berrington claims. “He started shouting really aggressively and saying I was being precious, and it was too difficult to work with actresses like me.” Berrington says she ended up in tears. “He said, ‘With scenes like this, I shoot what I want and I show what I want.’” Devastated, Berrington pulled out of the project.
When we put these points to Poliakoff, he replied: “I am sorry to hear Emily is upset. This is not my recollection of the conversation and, as I recall, my main purpose of the discussion – which took place a couple of months before the actual shoot – was to reassure her in a supportive way about the role. I have always been very conscious that nude scenes are extremely stressful for actors, male or female, and never want them to feel uncomfortable in any way. It is a brilliant development that we now have intimacy coordinators.”
A BBC spokesperson added: “We support positive change and welcome the industry-wide guidelines in place around filming intimate scenes, and expect all our productions to work to the highest standard of integrity in every area including casting.”
Berrington joins the list of actresses who have been speaking out about what they say they were required to do in nude or intimate scenes, either on stage and screen. Just before Christmas, there were reports that Ruth Wilson quit the hit US TV drama The Affair after becoming frustrated by the frequency and nature of the sex and nude scenes she had to perform. Emilia Clarke recently told Dax Shepard on the Armchair Expert podcast that she’d been in tears before some of her sex scenes in Game of Thrones, which she found “terrifying”. And those are just the more recent ones.
As more women come forward, the industry is scrambling to implement better practices on stage and on set. Many believe that intimacy coordinators – professionals who choreograph sex or nude scenes – are the answer. In Britain, Directors UK released guidelines supporting this last year. In the US, the Screen Actors Guild (or SAG-AFTRA as they are now known, after a merger) has done likewise – and lobbied for legislation that will require actors to give consent for digitally created sex scenes in which they feature.
But are things actually improving for actors on set? “I definitely had nerves going into it,” says Isabelle Grill of her sex scene in last year’s Midsommar in which her character Maja seduces Christian (played by Jack Reynor) in a quasi-pagan ritual. As the two have sex on a bed of flowers, naked women hold hands and chant. It’s weird, unnerving and very explicit. But despite that, and the fact that this was the 22-year-old’s first major role, she felt safe.
Grill says she and director Ari Aster “discussed everything” when she was offered the role: “Why is this in the film? Is it important for my character? What am I comfortable with?” When it came to rehearsals, every thrust, sigh and kiss was choreographed while both actors were fully clothed. “It’s almost like a dance,” Grill explains. “It’s really rehearsed.” On set, it felt weird at first – how could it not? But, having drilled the scene so thoroughly, Grill quickly got used to it. What was the worst thing about it? “The flowers got stuck in my hair! I kept finding them back at the hotel.”
When it comes to sex scenes, improvisation seems to be the worst thing you can do. For the new breed of intimacy coordinators, the action should be planned in the same way as a car chase or similar such stunt – rigorously and well in advance. “You always need to have conversations with actors and directors ahead of time and set boundaries,” says Alicia Rodis, an HBO intimacy coordinator who has worked on shows from Watchmen to Crashing and the forthcoming Lovecraft Country. Her biggest challenge to date? Choreographing a 30-person orgy for The Deuce, David Simon’s series about the “golden age of porn”. Rodis made a spreadsheet of each performer’s individual requirements. “I have very strong security on my computer,” she says with a laugh.
TV’s intimacy coordinators have another benefit: they can provide continuity in an industry where it’s not uncommon for episodes to be shot by different directors. “You have to go through everything again with the new director,” explains Arienne Mandi, who is currently starring in Showtime’s reboot of The L Word, the groundbreaking lesbian and bisexual drama. “That’s not always good with shooting a sex scene. So it’s nice to have an someone on the journey with you. It feels more comfortable.”
Rodis has seen a shift, as more directors recognise the necessity of intimacy coordinators. “People are realising that missteps can lead to trauma,” Rodis explains. Ben Taylor, who was a director on Catastrophe, agrees: “Everyone’s heard the horror stories. Directors saying, ‘Just get on with it.’ But you can’t rush sex scenes, because the potential for trauma cannot be ignored.”
Taylor was nominated for a Bafta for Catastrophe, which featured frequent sex scenes between Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney. “I had the advantage that Rob was very happy to get his bum out,” he says, “so when you have a big hairy man’s arse, you can use it to hide other stuff that isn’t exposed.”
Without Delaney’s backside to provide cover, Taylor found the challenges of directing Sex Education – the hit Netflix show in which a young cast often perform explicit scenes – more considerable. He brought intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien on board. “A big part of what she did was help to demystify and take the fear away,” he says. “So actors weren’t dreading performing a sex scene.”
Not all directors are as progressive, though, and Rodis has been left rolling her eyes on plenty of occasions: “There have been directors I’ve worked with who say, ‘I can handle this, I understand how to do this.’” Yet the presence of an intimacy coordinator can lead to a better final product, says Mandi: “It gives you the confidence and support to really play the scene.”
However, intimacy coordinators are only an option for bigger-budget productions. “There is a movement for change, but it’s not actually hit the industry yet,” says Jennifer Greenwood of the actors’ union Equity. On the mostly regional theatre productions Greenwood works on, “the whisper of ‘intimacy direction’ hasn’t yet been mentioned”.
Drama schools, she says, should do more to educate students about consent: “A lot peddle this idea that in order to be a good actor, you have to be open and say yes to everything – that if you don’t want to kiss someone in a role, maybe you’re not brave or daring enough. So it’s about trying to change that attitude as well.”
Another corrective is to have more women on sets. “We’ve got to stop looking through the male lens,” says theatre director Melly Still. “We’ve become so used to it, we think it’s the norm. Think about what the lens is.” She argues that nudity for its own sake needs to be phased out: no more Game of Thrones-style “sexposition”. Berrington tells me of TV shows she’s worked on where executives stipulate nudity quotas, meaning a certain amount of bare flesh per episode. If one actor refuses to strip off, another has to take their place.
A better approach might be to swerve sex and nudity scenes wherever possible. “You always need to interrogate whether you actually need to show sex,” says Susanna White, the Bafta-winning director of Bleak House, Jane Eyre and The Deuce, who helped draft the new Directors UK guidelines. “Is it the best way to tell the story?” White tells me that the most erotic scene she ever shot – with Ruth Wilson in Jane Eyre – didn’t feature much nudity. “It was just backlit scenes of her taking clothing off. It was beautiful.”
Still has been directing the ongoing adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, currently at the National Theatre. During a critical rape scene, she replaced the actor playing Lila with a puppet. “I wanted to show the experience from Lila’s point of view without just simulating rape,” Still explains. “It was about communicating that disembodiment and the sensation of Lila being outside of her body watching herself, without fetishising violence against women.”
Improvements in digital technology make it easier than ever to erase a performer’s underwear in post-production, meaning there’s less requirement for them to be nude on set. “We spent a lot of time painting out underwear in Sex Education,” says Taylor. “You would never ask an actor to be naked just because you can’t afford to pay for the editing – that’s a grim request.”
Prosthetics can also be useful. “We used an amazing prosthetic in Sex Education for the scene where Adam gets his dick out in the canteen,” says Taylor. “The guy who builds prosthetics for Star Wars made us that dick.” But again, it’s only an option if you have the budget.
After her experience with Poliakoff, Berrington thought she’d never consider doing a nude scene again. But her experience in the Almeida’s 2018 revival of Machinal, a hellish portrayal of a woman suffocating at work and at home, showed her there was a better way of doing things. In one scene, she was supposed to appear nearly nude under a bedsheet, before standing and slipping on a robe. Although director Natalie Abrahami assured her she could wear a costume if she’d prefer, Berrington wanted to play the role as it was written – the nudity was integral to her character’s development, from repressed to sexually liberated. But she was anxious: how much would the audience see?
And then Abrahami had a brainwave: why didn’t Berrington go and sit in the audience and she’d take her part? Abrahami stripped off and went through Berrington’s on-stage movements, while the actor sat in different seats in the auditorium, checking what she could see. “I thought it was the most fantastic, supportive act,” Berrington says. “She wouldn’t expect me to do anything she wouldn’t be prepared to do herself. She knew I had a right to see what could be seen by the audience. It gave me the confidence and freedom to play the scene – and forget about the nudity.”
• This article was amended on 7 February 2020 because an earlier version implied the stage adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels was solely by the National Theatre. While My Brilliant Friend is currently at the National Theatre, it is a co-production with the Rose Theatre in Kingston.
