Intimacy coordinator Marci Liroff was left feeling “betrayed” by HBO after watching a risqué scene from its controversial series “The Idol.”
The scene in question came during the June 4 premiere episode and showed a fictional intimacy coordinator being locked in the bathroom as Lily-Rose Depp’s pop-star protagonist, Jocelyn, bared her nipples at an album cover shoot.
“To be honest, I had a very visceral reaction. I was appalled,” Liroff, who has no connection to the show, told PvNew in an interview published Friday.
The casting director and acting coach also referenced HBO’s groundbreaking decision to bring on Alicia Rodis for “The Deuce” in 2018, marking the first time an intimacy coordinator was hired for a major US production.
“We look at HBO as our stalwart home, so to speak, because their work with [Rodis] was so good that they made it mandatory that all projects on HBO [featuring sexually intimate scenes] must hire in an intimacy coordinator. It set a standard, and many other streamers and networks have followed along,” she continued.
Liroff — whose previous credits include “Hightown,” “This Is Us” and “From Scratch” — admitted she felt like HBO was “making fun of us and the job” by including that scene in “The Idol.”
“They were using us as the butt of the joke,” she added.
HBO did not immediately respond to Pvnew’s request for comment.
Since before its debut, “The Idol” has faced backlash from critics and viewers for its excessive nudity and graphic sex scenes, with Rolling Stone describing the series as a “rape fantasy.”
British GQ also blasted the show’s second episode earlier this week for having the “worst sex scene in history.”
“It’s hard to imagine anything as unsexy as what we’re told to believe is the most radical, boundary-pushing TV sex ever,” Lucy Ford wrote in a review published Monday.
“The dialogue and choreography feel like they’re plucked from the brain of a horned-up teenager who just found out they could google ‘boobs’ on Google Images,” she added.
The provocative drama, co-created by Sam Levinson, Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye and Reza Fahim, also lost more than 100,000 viewers from its June 4 premiere, per PvNew.
Meanwhile, the fate of “The Idol” is up in the air as Season 1 continues to draw criticism.
“This was never meant to be a long-running show, it was always … a limited series,” a source told Pvnew.
However, a source at HBO said “the door is definitely still open — it’s definitely not a decision [yet]. At this point, this is normal in our process … we’re only two episodes in.”
