Rachel Zegler, the actor who rose to fame as the lead in Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, spoke up in support of intimacy coordinators after being criticised by Sean Bean earlier in the week.
As a matter of fact, Bean said that such coordinators brought in post-MeToo to help police on-set safety can spoil the spontaneity of shooting a sex scene.
It would inhibit me more because it was drawing attention to things, Bean said. Somebody said: Do this, put your hands there, while you touch his thing. He said that the natural way that lovers behave would be ruined by someone bringing it down to a technical exercise. Bean, who played in Game of Thrones, compared recent experiences to his time shooting a 1993 TV series of Lady Chatterley's Lover opposite Joely Richardson.
Lady Chatterley was spontaneous, Bean said. It was a joy. We had a good chemistry between us, and we knew what we were doing was unusual. I was married because she was married. We were trying to portray the truth of what DH Lawrence wrote. In a post on Twitter, Zegler took issue with Bean's position, saying intimacy coordinators establish an environment of safety for actors and that spontaneity can be unsafe in intimate scenes. She expressed her gratitude to the coordinator who worked with them and Ansel Elgort on West Side Story, saying they showed grace to a newcomer like myself, who had had years of experience. Bean also criticized post-shoot editing of intimate scenes, saying he was saddened by the fact that he, co-star Lena Hall and a mango had been cut from the Snowpiercer TV series.
The best work you do when you're trying to push the boundaries, and the very nature of it is experimental gets censored when TV companies or advertisers say it's so much, said Bean. It is a nice scene, quite surreal, dream-like and abstract. Asked about the origins of intimacy coordinators, who are trying to protect vulnerable actors, Bean said: I suppose it depends on the actress. Hall had a musical cabaret background, so she was up for anything. Hall, who has appeared in Broadway productions of Kinky Boots, Cats and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, responded by saying that Bean was an awesome actor and made me feel not only comfortable but also like I had a true acting partner in those bizarre scenes. She added that if I feel comfortable with my scene partner and others in the room, I won't need an intimacy coordinator. If there is a part of me that is feeling weird, gross, over exposed etc, I will challenge the necessity of the scene or I ll want an IC intimacy coordinator Other actors who have taken issue with Bean's position include The Good Place s Jameela Jamil, who tweeted that sex scenes should only be technical. It is like a stunt. Our job as actors is to make it not look technical. Nobody wants an impromptu grope. Adrian Lyne, director of the Guardians, expressed ambivalence about intimacy coordinators, as he spoke to the Guardian earlier this year.
It implies a lack of trust. That is all I have. If the actors don't trust me, I might as well go home. I have to make myself vulnerable for them, to know I would spill my guts, do anything for them. I get the same back, with any luck. He contrasted his most recent film, Deep Water, with Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas who began a relationship on the set, with making Fatal Attraction in the 1980 s.
The stars of the film, Glenn Close and Michael Douglas, swigged champagne before their first sex scene, and margaritas before their second. Lyne said something. It's not like they're going to get paralysed or something.