THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2019 19“nonnegotiable.” Why weren’t sex scenes
governed by the same approach?
When Rodis heard that a fellow fight
choreographer, Tonia Sina, had begun
offering what she called intimacy direction
and choreography services, she reached
out to her. In 2015, the two women joined
forces with a third actor turned fight direc-
tor, Siobhan Richardson, to found their
own company, Intimacy Directors Inter-
national. Initially most of their work was
in the theater, where a series of scandals
had focused attention on the question of
how sex was performed onstage.
By late 2017, however, the nascent
#MeToo and Time’s Up movements were
drawing similar scrutiny to the TV and film
industry, with allegations of on- and off-
set wrongdoing leveled at actors includ-
ing Kevin Spacey, Jeffrey Tambor, and
Jeremy Piven. Then, in January 2018, the
Los Angeles Times published an article in
which several women accused the Deuce
executive producer and lead actor James
Franco of behavior on film sets that was
“in appropriate or sexually exploitative.”
One woman said he had removed protec-
tive guards from actresses’ genitals dur-
ing an oral-sex scene. (Franco’s attorney
disputed the women’s stories and told the
paper, “The allegations about the protec-
tive guards are not accurate.”)
The next month, shortly before The
Deuce was scheduled to begin taping its
second season, Rodis got a message from
a producer on the show. “He was like,
‘I’m looking at a website, and, um, it says
that you do a service?’ ” She called him
back, and two days later—after binge-
watching the first season of the show—
she went to Silvercup Studios in Queens
to meet with David Simon and nine or 10
long-faced HBO producers and execu-
tives, each of whom had a copy of her
résumé. “You could tell something was
up,” she said dryly.
For the show’s first season, Nina
K. Noble, an executive producer and a
longtime collaborator of Simon’s, had
taken various steps to ensure actors’ com-
fort, from personally reviewing scripts
with them to improvising intimacy barri-
ers out of yoga mats. But after #MeToo’s
allegations and revelations, Noble told
me, some of the cast members had asked
the producers to do more, and she agreed
that it was time for outside help. (I asked
Noble whether the decision was related to
the allegations against Franco; she deniedperformers were often left to muddle
their way through the action. Some direc-
tors had an attitude of, as she put it, “I
want to discuss what your character does
for everything until it gets to anything sex-
ual, and then just go for it.” The message
that sends to actors is: “ ‘You know how to
kiss; kiss how you kiss.’ But no one should
give a shit about how the actor kisses”—or
comports himself sexually—“it should be
about the character.” At best, this inatten-
tion produced lackluster sex scenes. At
worst, it suggested an un serious attitude
that could leave performers feeling con-
fused if not traumatized.
Rodis was struck by how much more
care went into staging physical inter-
actions that were violent or dangerous than
into staging those that were sexual. For a
fight scene, choreographers mapped out
every beat, helping actors work through
each movement in slow motion, over and
over, until they were automatic. In stunt
work, a focus on safety was consideredshould expect. The day of the shoot, the
three met in person to discuss in more
detail who would be touching whom,
how, and where. A conversation like this,
Rodis explained, can also involve cho-
reographic elements, such as “setting
the number of pumps.” Once she had
established that everyone was comfort-
able with the plan and made sure both
actors had robes to wear before and after
the scene, it was finally time for filming.
H
OWEVER BASIC ALL of this
might seem, Rodis’s work repre-
sents a major departure from how sex
scenes have historically been planned—
or, as has often been the case, improvised.
Rodis, who is 38, began acting onstage in
her teens and continued through her 20s,
when she added some TV acting and also
took up fight directing and stunt work.
On TV sets, she found, actresses were
sometimes expected to shed their shirt
without advance notice. As for sex scenes,
Illustration by JOHN CUNEO