Alicia Vikander revealed there were times she didn’t feel protected filming intimate scenes early in her career, telling Harper’s Bazaar in a candid interview that she “should have been looked after.”
“The only thing that can’t be improvised is an intimate scene — you have to make choreography and stick to it,” the Oscar winner said in an article published on Wednesday.
“It’s the worst thing ever to do those scenes,” she added. “I am very comfortable with my body and I’ve done quite a bit of nudity and sex scenes, but it’s never easy.”
Vikander also spoke about intimacy coordinators now common in the film industry, and said they “should have existed at the beginning of my career.”
“I’ve been in situations that were not fine, where I didn’t feel I was protected,” the “Ex Machina” star said. She recalled one incident in which “everyone was busy doing their own thing and, in the middle, you have an actor who sits there naked for a couple of hours.”
“And someone is supposed to arrive with a robe, and they don’t,” Vikander said. “It comes afterwards — [the knowledge that] that was not right. I should have been looked after.”
Intimacy coordinators are relatively new on television and movie sets, introduced to Hollywood amid the Me Too movement in 2017 by “The Deuce” actor Emily Meade. The position, in existence for years in the theatre world, ensures that actors filming personal scenes are safeguarded and treated with sensitivity.
Meade, who plays a sex worker in the HBO series set in the 1970s, told HuffPost in 2019 she went to the network to suggest an intimacy coordinator after realizing she “felt uncomfortable” about certain scenes earlier in her career.
“I just went to HBO and the producers of the show and asked for somebody to be there to sort of oversee the communication of the sex scenes,” Meade said at the time. “I didn’t know that an ‘intimacy coordinator’ was even a job, which is sad and crazy because I should have been using it for a long time.”
Claire Warden, director of advanced training at the Intimacy Directors and Coordinators organization, told HuffPost about the pressure actors face to tolerate situations that don’t feel safe.
The theater and film industry “condition[s] our actors to always say ‘yes,’ because if you say ‘no,’ you’re being difficult,” Warden said. “Or someone else will say ‘yes’ and [they’ll be offered] the job.”
Language in this story was updated to clarify the context of Warden’s quote.