Sometimes, it feels like we’re stuck in a sea of endless discourse about sex scenes in media. The debate continues to swirl about the frequency of those scenes in movies and television, the reaction to them across different generations, and whether or not they’re “relevant” to the plot.
Along the way, a conversation has also started about how those sex scenes are brought to life, and the significance of on-set intimacy coordinators… and now, House of the Dragon star Olivia Cooke is proving just how important that conversation is.
In a recent interview with iPaper to promote her work on the new Prime Video series The Girlfriend, Cooke offered heaps of praise for the show’s intimacy coordinators. She argued that they help her and other performers through what could otherwise be “really precarious and vulnerable situations” where you feel like “a chunk of yourself as been taken.”
“It’s amazing to me that people had to just fudge their way through those scenes before those people existed,” Cooke argued, before adding that, “[The embarrassment is amplified for] those who are just starting out and don’t have the vocabulary to say what they’re not comfortable with. And for women, who’ll often get labelled ‘difficult’ or ‘a bitch’ for speaking up.”
“[Good intimacy coordinators can] sense hesitation and become your voice,” Cooke continued, adding that, “[while] showing intimacy, passion is an integral part of reflecting the human experience.”
It Matters
For multiple reasons, I found Cooke’s take on the situation (and the fact that her quotes are going viral) to be really refreshing. Her comments are adding a bit more nuance into the larger sex scene debate, which has often gotten boiled down into the most outlandish extremes when hashed out on social media. Regardless of your personal feelings towards those kinds of scenes, it’s undeniable that something has changed in how they’ve come to life across the past few decades of popular culture.
Shifting gender politics both on and off the screen, the rise of the four-quadrant crowd-pleasing blockbuster, and the hiatus of a lot of mid-budget genres like the erotic thriller have led to onscreen sex scenes feeling few and far between, and therefore subject to more attention and scrutiny. (If you want an in-depth look at just how much things have changed, check out Karina Longworth’s excellent work on the “Erotic 80s” and “Erotic 90s” seasons of her film history podcast You Must Remember This.) Even just within the Game of Thrones franchise, which Cooke is now a part of, characters have engaged in sex scenes that have ranged from tender to extremely polarizing to upsetting… and audiences have responded with some form of pearl clutching practically every time.
That is a whole separate conversation in and of itself, but the fact of the matter is: sex scenes in movies and shows will (hopefully) never completely go away. Despite what the Internet might want you to believe, there will always be instances where those moments make sense “for the plot”: to crescendo the relationship between two people, to reveal integral moments of character, and sometimes to just have a bit of fun. And if (with the help of intimacy coordinators) the experience of bringing them to life is handled with nuance and care, just like what Cooke is describing, then that’s the best-case scenario.
(featured image: HBO)
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