We've been hearing a lot about the sex recession in the last couple of years, but here's the thing. Sex on screen, it's back, baby. There's been this whole Heated Rivalry thing, of course, and then there's a new season of Bridgerton and the new Wuthering Heights, which is supposed to be very steamy, just made 83 million globally in its opening weekend. But behind the literal scenes, those coordinating intimacy are intimacy coordinators. And like, this was a job that was one of the big wins of the Me Too movement. Here's the thing, every once in a while you hear a little question mark about the job. So for example, Gwyneth Paltrow, she was one of the high profile voices in the MeToo movement recently when she was on her press tour for the Oscar contender, Marty Supreme. She sort of implied she didn't know intimacy coordinators really existed until she started working on the film. So today I'm going to sit down with a Hollywood intimacy coordinator Yehuda Duenyas. We're gonna talk about the state of this very new industry and talk about how we tell the story of sex on screen. Stay with me.

When people ask you on a flight, what do you say you do?

My name's Yehuda Duenyas. I'm an intimacy coordinator, which means that I help films and productions navigate intimate scenes in film and television.

Have you, like, stopped telling people what you do, or like, is there...

Yeah, I've totally stopped telling people what I do.

What kind of questions were you getting at first?

Well, sometimes they ask, is that like porn? And I say, no, it's for film and television. It's, you know, shows that you see on Netflix and HBO and Paramount Plus. And whenever you see an intimate scene or a sex scene or anything like that, there's usually someone now more commonly, there's someone on set helping to shape and navigate those scenes. And that's what I do.

Was it one of these things where you were working on a particular show and someone was like, we don't know what to do, or like, what was the, who was the person who said, hey, could you help us with this?

Yeah, no, it was me saying, hey, we need to figure out a way to safely do this, because I was directing a play that had some very extreme violent sexual incestuous content. And I had been involved in a couple of shows where a director just did not know how to handle intimacy. And so the director would tell you, why don't you and your partner go out into the hallway and work something out and come back and show it to me? Which has a lot of problems wrapped up inside of that. There's a lot issues there. And I've had friends who've had really terrible experiences with that. Mine weren't terrible, they were just awkward. And I just knew that we needed a structure to do it.

'I don't know if I should start with what you do or how people complain about what you do. But we've now reached a point where every A-list actress in particular gets asked when they're on a press tour, hey, did you use an intimacy coordinator? There are some sex scenes in this thing. And they either, they answer in a variety of ways, I think, depending on age, frankly. So, first, just explain to me, like... What is the what are the very basics of what you do?

Absolutely. So, I tell people that my job is to handle the intimate moments in film and television the same way that a stunt coordinator would handle dangerous moments. I work with a director to understand their vision. I communicate with the actors to understand the boundaries or concerns if there are any.

So let me do code some of that. It sounds like the first thing you said is you actually look at the script

Oh yeah, yeah.

Figure out what's the point of this sex scene? Which for many of us who grew up with sort of pointless sex scenes or pointless intimacy scenes that are kind of just backdrop to see a nude person, like sometimes I don't think that's been given very much thought. So it sounds like one of the things is just being like, what does everyone expect to get out of this?

I would say yes to that, but we don't editorialize. Like, we're really not there to criticize the scene. We want to professionalize these scenes. So we want them to be, and we want actors not to be hothouse flowers. Acting is not comfortable. What they're doing, what actors do, is they're poeticizing the most difficult moments of the human condition. That's what drama is. And so acting is not uncomfortable, but it should be professional. Like, you're not going to improvise a car crash. When we create nudity and simulated sex writers, we do them for every scene. And so because consent needs to be specific to every scene and because an actor agrees to, let's say, nudity in simulated sex in one context of one scene, that doesn't mean that in a next episode or in a different scene of a film, that they will agree to the same thing. Maybe the context has shifted. And so consent is specific to each scene. And so we will talk with the director about each scene that we pull out of a script, that we flag in a script. Once we get the director's vision, we'll then talk with an actor and we'll say, listen, this is the creative ask and how are you feeling about it? And the actor might say, yep, great, all good. Or they might say. Yes, but I actually, you know, I don't want to show this part of my body. Or they might say, I just don't wanna show this side of my body because I have an injury or because of, you know, body awareness or something like that. And so, we really help facilitate those conversations. That conversation then gets put into a nudity and simulated sex rider.

And rider meaning this like legal clause that gets added to the contract that's like, hey, we worked it out officially. Exactly. And also if you're in violation of that, I can sue.

Exactly. And so it's really, yes, they can see, it protects the studios, it protects the actor, it also psychologically creates a legal document of understanding where this is what we're going to agree to, this is what we agree to show. Like, what are we allowed to do? What are the edges that we can play to while still keeping an actor's boundaries intact?

How many times have you had to give this speech? Like, convince someone, like, hey, I'm not here to create problems.

'Less and less, actually. I feel like as it's becoming more common, I mean, we're, you know, we're part of the industry and we have been for a while and we're now a unionized part of the industry. And we're you know protected by SAG-AFTRA, like we have a SAG...

But all that's really new. It may be something you've done for a while, but having it registered, protected by the actors, all these things are relatively new. Very new. So when you do have pushback, what does it sound like?

Conversation with a director starts out as a creative conversation. We're not coming in saying this is what you can do and this is you can't do, like that's not what we're there for.

One of the things that's interesting about this as a business is it is known at this point as one of the legacy sort of things that came out of the Time's Up Me Too movement, which was disproportionately sort of rooted in Hollywood because of Harvey Weinstein and like, then all the stories that actresses in particular started to tell. So it all leads back to this particular road of like these moments. And this is one of the few concrete things that came out of that moment. But it's not, it feels like not everyone, everyone is not all in agreement that it's an unmitigated good for it to exist as a job.

No, I guess not. I mean, people might not all agree, but I think that what people can agree is that we need professional standards around these types of scenes. And so that's really what we bring into the table is that were professionalizing these scenes. So it's not about should I have this or shouldn't I have. I'll give you an example. As you are coming in for this kiss, pause for two seconds before you connect lips and look at each other. Like just that simple thing, like could really just amplify the story of a kiss. And it's really just a functional choreographic thing to say. And so we can really help. A director, a production, a show runner, and actors navigate these things. And now also a lot of times actors know how to do this stuff. And they've been some actors that I work with, they're like, listen, I've been doing this for years, I know how kiss someone. And I say, great, I'm here if you need me. We want to create a sense of freedom on set, not a sense, you know, stifling.

We're talking to Yehuda Duenyas. He is an intimacy coordinator about what it's like to help film sex for the movies. Stay with us.

So let me run through some of the criticism because I think it would be sort of good for people to hear this. So there's the world of what I would call the sort of old timers who they get asked this question and an example famous one is the actor Sean Bean. He was asked about intimacy coordinators and he says, quote, I think the natural way lovers behave would be ruined by someone bringing it down to a technical exercise.

'I mean, the first thing I'll say to that specific quote is that actors are not lovers, they are at work. That's the first things. Actors are telling a story of love. They are not the actual lovers involved in the scene. They are performing the love in the seen. And so I think when we can, you know, kind of back the lens up a little bit, and this is really gonna get into like, well, no acting is, you now, acting is. There's a lot of different, just you know a lot different of schools of acting. And a lot of different schools of directing. And Sean Bean might work that way and then his co-star might not work that way. And his co star might want a little bit more structure. There's some intimacy coordinators who are really anti improvisation. I'm personally not. Every move, every finger movement, every blink of an eye does not need to be choreographed. But we should know, basically, where is the scene starting? What's the middle of it? What's ending of it. You know, if an actor is like, well, I'm just going to go off on my own and do my own lines because I feel like just improvising and everything has to be spontaneous and real all the time, that argument kind of falls apart if you keep pulling at it, you know, and keep kind of unraveling it because you have to work with other people. There's a script to follow, there's a shot. You can't walk out of frame.

But it was a great comment because it sort of highlighted all of these, this category of comment. Jennifer Lawrence, the same thing. Like she was in Robert Pattison with, for Die My Love and she's on the one hand being like, it's not weird. He's normal. He's a nice guy. So I didn't need any of that.

'I felt really safe with him. He's like not pervy. So there wasn't any like weird like, does he think I like him? If there was a little bit of that, I would probably have an intimacy coordinator. Because a lot of male actors get offended if you don't want, like--

Actually want to **** them?

'-- wan to **** them. Yeah, and then the punishment starts.

And similar, Gwyneth Paltrow, famously talking about Marty Supreme. And she's very like, now there's something called an intimacy coordinator, which I did not even know existed. And, you know, you can step back. Like it's just this world of people who are like, I survived the bad old days. I don't need this help. And maybe that's for some other people out there, but not me. But in the world of Hollywood, they probably really appreciate it, right? Like, you could look at a young actress and be like, look. I did this so many years with such and such and they never complained.

I actually hear a lot of hurt in those comments. I don't want to read into it too deeply, but yeah, they are kind of battle hardened, as you put it. You know, the number one on the call sheet, the star, probably does know what they're doing. And I would have a much different conversation with them than I would when number 50 on the call sheet comes in to do a scene with that star. I feel like this is just introducing a different level of sensitivity and care into the conversation. And that doesn't mean restriction. It just means like, hey, this can be awkward. Let's talk about it. I will say that every actor who had not worked with an intimacy coordinator before, who I've worked with says, I don't understand how we did this without you. Where were you when I was 19? Like I've heard that from everyone across the board. And I've also heard, you know, on set working with the costumers, they're like, oh my God, thank God you're here because this was my job. If an actor didn't want to do something, I would tell, I would say to the director that, no, you can't do that with this person because the actor would confide to the hair and makeup person or the wardrobe person that, you know, I'm feeling really uncomfortable about this particular scene. And so I'm just keep bringing it back to like, why not professionalize this aspect of the work? Why, why does any, you know, every other department has a department.

I figure they just didn't want to pay another person, to be honest. Sometimes when I hear the complaints, it sounds like, Ugh, another set of lawyers in another conversation, I'm just barely getting this movie made.

Absolutely, but why are we cutting a corner on this particular thing? We're seeing this boom in like intimate scenes now. We're seeing Heated Rivalry, we're seeing like almost every film at Sundance had some kind of, you know, the film that I worked on at Sundan, Gregg Araki's "I Want Your Sex," to Olivia Wilde's "The Invite," to, you now, like all of these like had really wonderful, complicated, complex, intimate, sexual content. And I feel like that's been a real benefit that's showing up in an ROI. Like if you're like studio side, like looking at like, you know, a return on investment, like...

'So like, you know, I grew up in the 90s, there was lots of sex in films. Then some of the horror stories we're talking about now come from then, you know, Sharon Stone being upset about being asked to take her underwear off her Basic Instinct scene, where she's just crossing her legs, right? Like just nonsense things that were happening. Then we went through a period where everyone said, oh, there's, we don't want to see so much sex. The Economist was, was finding out that in 2024, sex scenes down nearly 40% since 2000. But here's what I want to talk to you about that's like off the page. I actually wonder if what we're seeing now and even embracing the intimacy coordinator has to do with the fact that the movies as we know it, they cannot offer physical technical sex that is more graphic or intense than porn. That's like not possible now because there's just so much pornography and it's so available. So, the thing they can make that's distinguishing... Would be intimacy, would be story and story-based sex.

Definitely. And you're right. I feel like, you know, the films of the 80s and 90s, not every film, obviously, but a lot of them, what you said earlier is like, okay, there's nudity to show nudity. Like, that was a sign that you were watching cable television, not network.

'Or even I saw The Postman Rings Twice, I re-watched it the other day on Hulu. It felt like I was just watching two actors who had been told, go for it.

Right, and I think that when we watch that, also knowing the conditions that those films were likely made in, lots of stories about like one actor just going rogue and another actor just feeling like, I just felt like I was completely violated on that set. But there's really a lot. Last Tango in Paris, Nine and a Half Weeks, like there's so many stories of particularly actresses who have felt just violated in those situations.

Even recently, I think Blue is the Warmest Color, which was supposed to be kind of a story about two young women. And of course, they've gone on in their careers and immediately said, oh, actually that thing you all loved, like that sucked for us. We felt like we were performing for a man who wanted to like, watch us make out.

Yeah, I mean, now what we do is we talk about the scenes and we have clarity around what we're gonna do and how we're going to do it. And the story can stay the same.

We've talked about the conversation, we've talked about the administration, but what is the thing you're actually doing that makes us think we're seeing sex on screen?

The way that I personally like to work is, I like to listen to the way that the actors talk about it, listen to that the director talks about it as well, and try and neutralize the language a little bit so that it becomes a little more, from my end anyway, choreographic. Like we can say, you know, change this angle a little, slow this tempo a little or start from a slow tempo and go to a fast tempo. Like there's, I mean. There's like an entire language that we use to help bring out the realism and the story of these scenes. We see this as an art form, in the same way that you want the best fight choreographer who's going to make your fights look amazing, or your stunt coordinator who's going to makes your stunts look amazing. We bring a real level of artistry to this work.

What is the message you would have had, looking back, if you could like talk to the Yehuda 15 years ago? What would you have told him about what he was about to be doing?

I would have said, keep going, just keep doing it, which I did anyway. But I was doing this at a time when it was, no one really knew about it or knew what it was. I would've loved to find some of the other people that were doing this. This could be a very lonely job, actually. It's you, it's just you, you're a department of one, you're on set, you're sort of like this new thing that some people want and some people don't want. You know, I started this work in 2007, like, that's literally the year the iPhone, I'm dating myself here, but, like that's the year the iPhone came out. You know? Like, it was, the word consent was in the dictionary, but it was not part of our, like cultural dialog. And so I would have loved to have more people who kind of understood the importance of what this was so that it didn't feel so, so lonely.

The irony of a job about intimacy being lonely.

Yeah!

Is not lost, right? Like, your one job is to connect and show people how to at least mimic connection. And yeah, you're at craft services by yourself.

Yes, that's totally true. I've also had a lot of interesting experiences where someone in an unrelated department will come up to me and say like, you're the intimacy coordinator, right? I'll say, yeah. I'm having these relationship issues, and I'm wondering if you can help me out.

Relationship issues or like physical intimacy issues?

I mean, I've had both. The title of my memoir is going to be, I Don't Know Why I'm Telling You This, because I've have a lot of people come up to me and say, I don't know why I'm telling you this, and then really sort of open up about really personal deep things. And I think like, you know, the fact that we are on set, we are people who are generally pretty comfortable with the idea of intimacy, or very well. Versed in the spectrum of human sexuality from vanilla to kink to relationship styles to, you know, all sorts of things that we learn about to do this job well. And I think that there's a level of discomfort that our culture in particular in the U.S. has with intimacy and sexuality like there's just so much shame in this

I agree.

Culture

I mean, that's actually why I care so much about the modern depictions, and people have heard me talk on the show about Heated Rivalry and how, like, my theory is people like it because it also, it depicts intimacy almost more than just physical sex. Yeah, falling in love. Like, we don't see it modeled very much. Yeah, like how do you have a conversation when you're in love? How do you a conversation, when you are in lust? I have to assume we're having a problem with this, or else the manosphere wouldn't exist, right? Like there are so many people, even incel culture, all of that is about the inability to understand how to functionally connect.

'I was going to say this goes back to my, you know, my big kind of like purpose in this work is that like we are beings who are wired for intimacy and we live in a culture that completely disconnects us from it and shames us for it. And shames for wanting it, needing it, learning how to discover it, having a language around it, having, you know, a decent sexual education in this country that goes beyond just What are the molecules that are reproducing in your body? Like, what is intimacy? What is relation? Like, how do people relate? What are different ways that people relate. And we're seeing so many more stories lately about the different ways that people connect and relate. I think what's so beautiful about Heated Rivalry is that there's, you know, there's this hidden thing that has to happen. Like they have to keep this thing a secret. And they're also discovering these new things about themselves. That's a very universal story. We all have discovered something about ourselves throughout our lives that has been scary or unknown, or no matter what your sexual orientation is, those stories of intimacy are the ones that are interesting. It's not just nudity for nudity's sake or sex for sex's sake. I feel like it's-

Because if that was it, you wouldn't have this generation that is less inclined to have sex, right? You wouldn't have all this reporting of like, younger people who haven't had sex the next amount of months, and also haven't been in a relationship with people who are in a cycle of apps where they have kind of sex on demand, but they don't have this other thing you're talking about, which is like the intimacy.

I feel like for younger generations now, just the idea of how to connect with another person is actually really scary, but that goes into a lot of just cultural politics that are happening right now as well. I feel there's just a real kind of breakdown of trust and a breakdown of understanding of how to connect.

Kind of reminds me of how high the stakes are. The stakes are, if we don't see things modeled for us that are healthy, that we're doomed to all these other things, the trust issues and the loneliness issue and the inability to connect, some of those things, and I believe really strongly in storytelling, will never match the amount of porn that's out there in the world. But I don't think there's anything wrong with occasionally having storytelling and description of this part of our lives. So I really appreciate you talking to me about this. I know it's not easy, cause there's like a lot of little spiky aspects of it, but I really appreciated it. I've learned a lot.

I'm so happy to speak with you, Audie. Thank you.

Tell me what you're doing now, describe the film, tell people what you are up to, where they can find you.

There's a lot of projects going on, but like something that's going to come out right, you know, pretty soon is Gregg Araki's I Want Your Sex, which is a fantastic film. It stars Olivia Wilde, and Cooper Hoffman, and Chase Sweet Wonders. You can find me specifically at CINTIMA. That's the cinematic intimacy artist. That's CINTIMA.co, especially if you're interested in training to become an intimacy coordinator. And Yehuda Duenyas on Instagram.

Yehuda Duenyas. He is from CINTIMA. They're an intimacy coordinator training group. And, you guys, we'll be back next week