HBO made history in 2018 for hiring Alicia Rodis on “The Deuce,” making her the first-ever intimacy coordinator on a major U.S. production. Then, in the June 4 premiere episode of HBO’s “The Idol,” a fictional intimacy coordinator got locked in a bathroom for doing his job.
In the scene, pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) is shooting photos for her album cover when she pulls open her robe to reveal her nipples. Immediately, the mousy and neurotic intimacy coordinator on set (played by Scott Turner Schofield) interrupts to remind the photographer (Eddy Chen) that the nudity rider in Jocelyn’s contract only permits the depiction of her “side-boob, under-boob and side flank.” The contract has been reviewed by “the label and her people,” he says, so any changes made require a 48-hour delay of the photo shoot, despite that Jocelyn chose to show her breasts without being directed to.
“I’m not allowed to show my body?” she asks the coordinator, who stutters, “Not in the general human rights structure of it all.” Eventually, Jocelyn’s manager Chaim (Hank Azaria) steps in, shoving the coordinator behind a door and paying a random passerby $5,000 to keep him trapped until the shoot concludes.
It’s certainly arguable that the scene serves to emphasize how unprotected and exploited Jocelyn is, a theme continuously explored in “The Idol,” which was co-created by Sam Levinson, Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye and Reza Fahim. At the same time, intimacy coordination is still a relatively new field that even the entertainment industry still misunderstands, and to depict one as jittery and paperwork-obsessed, with corny, wide-eyed lines about how his work is “actually very progressive,” doesn’t come without complications. So PvNew spoke to Marci Liroff, an intimacy coordinator with no connection to “The Idol,” to evaluate the impact and accuracy of the scene.
“To be honest, I had a very visceral reaction. I was appalled,” says Liroff, whose credits as an intimacy coordinator include “Hightown,” “From Scratch” and “This Is Us.” “I’m not alone in this, in terms of my intimacy coordinator communities: We look at HBO as our stalwart home, so to speak, because their work with Alicia 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. So I felt really betrayed that they were making fun of us and the job. They were using us as the butt of the joke.”
But Liroff says she now finds herself torn: “I have been in some situations where there’s a lot of pushback from a director or producer who doesn’t quite understand what we bring to a set. Our position is very similar to a stunt coordinator, and you would never do some of the stuff that [has been done to me] to a stunt coordinator. So I sat with it and I realized that this actually was a very accurate — although heightened and extreme — depiction of some of the crazy pushback that I’ve experienced.”
As Liroff explains it, intimacy coordinators first have meetings with the people in charge, “in this case, probably the photographer and her manager to find out what they’re looking for. I’d drill down and get very specific about what body points we are going to be seeing.” Then, there’s a one-on-one meeting between the intimacy coordinator and the performer to get a sense of what they’re okay with. If the performer’s boundaries don’t match up with a director’s requests, continued meetings happen until the creatives agree to solutions that maintain performers’ comfort, then a nudity rider is put in writing and signed. Any changes to that rider require a 48-hour delay in production, so that a performer is never put on the spot with a new request and forced to rethink their boundaries while on set.
In “The Idol,” it’s obvious that Jocelyn has not met with the intimacy coordinator in advance, but this isn’t necessarily inaccurate: “I have a feeling that Jocelyn’s team looked this over and spoke for her. There are many times when I’ll be in a situation where I need to speak directly to the talent, and let’s say they’re very high-level talent, and I never actually get to speak specifically to that person, which is really a shame,” Liroff says.
But that doesn’t explain why Jocelyn’s managers — who are very comfortable with Jocelyn showing off her body — would have agreed to censor her nipples in the first place.
Since “The Idol” premiered, much critique has been made of its sexual material, including in PvNew‘s review, which said that the series “plays like a sordid male fantasy.” That discourse added to an already hairy press cycle that was most prominently studded with allegations of a toxic set environment as well as extreme material that didn’t make the final cut, such as a scene where Jocelyn allegedly “was begging [Tesfaye’s character] to rape her.”
based on the scenes that have made it to the screen, as an intimacy coordinator, Liroff feels ambivalent about how the explicit content is handled. On the one hand, the performer at the center of the series has clearly given the filmmakers her consent.
“People are talking about how exploited Lily-Rose Depp is, but I’ve also watched and read several interviews with her, and what is very clear to me is that she is 1,000% on board with this,” she says. “This is not some young, helpless actress that comes from middle America, shows up in Hollywood and is completely taken advantage of.”
At the same time, Depp’s (and Jocelyn’s) feelings are not the only ones that come into play here.
“We have a nudity rider in place not only for the performer. It’s also for the crew,” Liroff says. “The crew needs a head’s up on what they’re going to be experiencing that day. They need to know if they’re seeing, for instance, a very violent rape scene. A scene that is very sensitive could be triggering, not just for the performers, but for the people that are watching it from 10 different angles. I usually talk to them ahead of time, saying, ‘This could be potentially triggering for you. I want you to notice the signs. Come to me if that’s happening. Take a breather. Go outside. Get some cold water.’ It’s the crew giving their general consent to witness this.”
“This job is very nuanced and complex. It’s very hard to explain, in one scene, what we do,” Liroff concludes. “And that scene used us as the butt of a joke, at the end of the day.”
