Two-time Academy Award-winning actor Michael Douglas (Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, Ant-Man) has given his opinion on Intimacy Coordinators on movie sets.
The job entails a coordinator who works with actors and producers when filming sensitive, intimate scenes in a film or series, and productions just began regularly having them in the last 10-15 years, well past the point of Douglas’s most sex scene-filled peak of his career.
But Douglas said he believes intimacy coordinators impede the process of the directors. In a recent interview with Radio Times, via The Telegraph, the actor explained:
“I’m past the age where I’ve got to worry about that. But it’s interesting with all the intimacy coordinators. It feels like executives taking control away from filmmakers — but there have been some terrible faux pas and harassment.”
He continued:
“Sex scenes are like fight scenes, it’s all choreographed. In my experience, you take responsibility as the man to make sure the woman is comfortable, you talk it through. You say, ‘Ok, I’m gonna touch you here if that’s all right’. It’s very slow but looks like it’s happening organically, which is hopefully what good acting looks like.”
Douglas acknowledges that bad conduct on the sets while performing intimacy scenes is a real issue, adding:
“I’m sure there were people that overstepped their boundaries, but before, we seemed to take care of that ourselves. They would get a reputation and that would take care of them… But I talked to the ladies, [because] I did a few of those sex movies — sexual movies — and we joke about it now, what it would have been like to have an intimacy coordinator working with us…”
So someone would get a bad reputation after assaulting a woman, or multiple women, and then they’d get less work? Douglas’s solution sounds like too little, too late, and like a slap on the wrist to men who were never given real consequences.
And as for him joking about what it would have been like to have an intimacy coordinator on set, I bet it would have been just fine. Considering Douglas’s age and how the times have changed since he made movies that would have necessitated an intimacy coordinator, maybe his opinion on the matter doesn’t really matter.