Gwyneth Paltrow told Vanity Fair that she and Timothée Chalamet have “a lot” of sex in Marty Supreme, which was her first experience with an intimacy coordinator because she “did not know [they] existed.” And honestly? That tracks.
“There’s now something called an intimacy coordinator, which I did not know existed,” Paltrow told the magazine. “I was like, ‘Girl, I’m from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on.’” Turns out, Paltrow was more comfortable filming without the intimacy coordinator than with.
“We said, ‘I think we’re good. You can step a little bit back,’ ” she said. “I don’t know how it is for kids who are starting out, but…if someone is like, ‘Okay, and then he’s going to put his hand here’…I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that.”
Gwyneth Paltrow told Vanity Fair of working with Chalamet, “I was like, ‘Okay, great. I’m 109 years old. You’re 14.’ ”
Intimacy coordinators are now industry standard for Hollywood sex scenes, but Paltrow isn’t the only actor who’s declined the help recently. Oscar-winning Anora star Mikey Madison, for instance, made waves when she told Pamela Anderson in their Variety Actors on Actors interview that she’d filmed the movie’s many sex scenes without a coordinator. “Mark Eydelshteyn, who plays Ivan, and I decided it would be best to just keep it small. My character is a sex worker, and I had seen Sean’s films and know his dedication to authenticity. I was ready for it. As an actress, I approached it as a job,” she said.
Predictably, the internet has also had opinions on Gwyneth Paltrow’s intimacy-coordinator thoughts. One Twitter user opined: “Push back against intimacy coordinators will always be weird to me like you are not the only person on set. you are not the only person filming sex scenes. they are there to protect everyone.” Other posters had a different take. “Before y’all turn this into her ‘trashing intimacy coordinators,’ nothing she says here actually criticizes the profession itself. she’s simply expressing how jarring it was to suddenly be given a choice in a situation where she’d never had a choice before,” one person wrote.
