Taking the camera under the covers

What could make someone more vulnerable than taking off his or her clothes in a room full of people and pretending to have sex with a colleague?

Difficult in the best of circumstances, sex scenes can easily go horribly wrong. According to Time’s Up, the Hollywood-led group that combats sexual harassment, actors have arrived on the day of the shoot and been pressured to show more of their bodies than they agreed to, or later discovered that members of the crew had taken videos of them on their smartphones and posted them online. Some actors have been told that they should have actual sex instead of simulating it.

Time’s Up has released guides on how to handle intimate and simulated sex scenes, and what actors should do in an audition if someone tells them to “come back sexier.” New laws in California and elsewhere make it easier to sue people like producers and directors for sexual harassment and have restricted the use of nondisclosure agreements, which prevent victims from speaking out and allow abusers to continue their harmful behavior.

And in the past two years, productions have been turning more and more to intimacy coordinators, whose job, which falls somewhere between stunt coordinator and therapist, is to make the scenes as comfortable as possible for the actors while still creating a convincing shoot. They have conversations about boundaries and sexually transmitted diseases. They make sure the performers have robes to wear between takes and covers for their genitals during filming. They also have precise conversations about what will and will not be shown, and see that those limits are written into contracts in the form of “nudity riders.”