Emilia Clarke in HBO's "Game of Thrones."

HBO is taking welcome steps to make sex scenes safer for actors across its programming. Actress Emily Meade, who plays a sex worker turned porn star on the drama series “The Deuce,” prompted the change after she approached the show’s creators and producers about installing an “advocate purely for the sexual scenes” on set. That’s when the network brought on Alicia Rodis, the associate director of Intimacy Directors International, a nonprofit that wants to normalize a “high standard for directing intimacy and sexual violence to prevent abuse and harassment.” Rodis counseled the cast and crew of “The Deuce” during the second season. The pilot program was apparently so successful that HBO confirmed on Thursday that an intimacy coordinator will be on set during any and all sexually intimate moments for all of its television series and films going forward.

As reported in @RollingStone, all @HBO programs with intimate scenes will be staffed by an intimacy coordinator: https://t.co/sdQww5PFrt — HBO PR (@HBOPR) October 25, 2018

Meade said having an intimacy coordinator on the set of the drama about the porn business in the 1970s, which often features explicit sex scenes, is similar to having a stunt coordinator. “When it comes to sexuality, which is one of the most vulnerable things for all humans, men and women, there’s really no system,” Meade said in an interview on the network’s website. “There’s never been a person required to be there to protect and bring expertise.” The actress later explained that Rodis will intervene in small but important ways, like giving a performer something to cover their private parts, knee pads, mouth spray or flavored lubricant, etc. “It’s just having someone other than yourself to think about it,” Meade told Rolling Stone. “Left to your own devices you’re just sort of doing what you do in real life. And that’s a problem if you don’t want it to feel like real life.”

Emily Meade in HBO's "The Deuce."