Gwyneth Paltrow Has Entered The Intimacy Coordinator Discourse
"I’m from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on."
After over a decade of staying away from what she considers real, vulnerable acting roles, Gwyneth Paltrow was in for a bit of a rude awakening when she began filming the sex scenes for her upcoming movie Marty Supreme. Not that she’s a stranger to getting intimate for a role, but the process has changed a bit since she filmed classics like Shakespeare in Love and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Her new project hired an intimacy coordinator for her to work with... but Paltrow didn’t really see the need.
In Marty Supreme, Paltrow plays the wife of a Ping-Pong pro who has an affair with Timothée Chalamet’s title character. As already evidenced by some steamy set shots of the two locking lips, Paltrow teased that she and Chalamet get very close in the movie.
“We have a lot of sex in this movie,” Paltrow said in a March 18 Vanity Fair profile. “There’s a lot—a lot.”
And all that bedroom choreography was supervised by an intimacy coordinator. At least, it was originally planned to be. Paltrow revealed she was completely unfamiliar with the now-common position after her time away from sensual films.
“There’s now something called an intimacy coordinator, which I did not know existed,” Paltrow said. “I was like, ‘Girl, I’m from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on.’”
The actor said she didn’t make much use of the coordinator. “We said, ‘I think we’re good. You can step a little bit back,’” Paltrow said. “I don’t know how it is for kids who are starting out, but…if someone is like, ‘OK, and then he’s going to put his hand here,’ I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that.”
Paltrow’s comments come at a time when the conversation around intimacy coordinators has become a bit of an industry controversy. During awards season, Anora star Mikey Madison revealed she declined to use an intimacy coordinator when filming the various sex scenes in the Oscar-winning movie. The revelation led way to a bigger argument about the necessity of the position.
