Michael Douglas shares problem with intimacy coordinators
Actor Michael Douglas has often had to work with intimacy coordinators throughout his career, having starred in some of the most memorable erotic thrillers of all time and performing in a number of sex scenes.
The Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction star has recently offered his opinion on the intimacy coordinator role and how they have recently become more prevalent in the big productions in Hollywood.
“I’m past the age where I’ve got to worry about that. But it’s interesting with all the intimacy coordinators,” Douglas recently told The Telegraph. “It feels like executives taking control away from filmmakers — but there have been some terrible faux pas and harassment.”
According to Douglas, he feels that sex scenes in a movie are similar to action set pieces in that they are all “choreographed” but claimed that he preferred to “take responsibility as the man to make sure the woman is comfortable.”
The sex scenes that Douglas has performed in have all occurred “very slowly”, though they look like they are “happening organically” when they arrive on screen in a film’s final cut.
Still, Douglas is willing to admit that harassment and sexual misconduct are a genuine problem on a film set, even though he is keen to point out that the presence of an intimacy coordinator has affected the overall atmosphere of the cast and crew.
“I’m sure there were people that overstepped their boundaries, but before, we seemed to take care of that ourselves,” Douglas said before explaining how any person who overstepped the mark was normally dealt with by the cast and crew themselves.
Today, Douglas has spoken with several of the female actors with whom he has shared a sex scene and “joked” about what it might have been like for them to work with an intimacy coordinator all those years ago.
Last year, director and actor Greta Gerwig said that intimacy coordinators on a film’s production “make perfect sense” when discussing the modern consideration of sexual abuse and harassment in the film industry.
“I think one substantive change is intimacy coordinators,” Gerwig had told Variety. “They make perfect sense. It’s like a fight choreographer. Nobody would ever say, ‘Just take these swords and see what happens; just duel a little and see where the spirit takes you.’ That’s insane.”
Sean Bean, on the other hand, had recently suggested that intimacy coordinators can inhibit the “natural” performance of an actor, so clearly, the industry seems to be split on their overall use, notably between the opinions of men and women.
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