20 SEPTEMBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC
DISPATCHES • SKETCHthat it was.) Rodis was asked to explain
exactly what she might bring to the show,
so she described the objectives of her
theatrical work—including choreography,
consent and safety, and cultivating a con-
nection between actors so as to promote
chemistry. Here, Simon jumped in. “We
don’t want them to be connected,” Rodis
remembered him saying. “This is trans-
actional sex, and shame on us if we try to
make that look glorified in any way.” She
emphatically agreed. That night, she was
offered the job.
I
N THE OPENING SEASON of The
Deuce, Emily Meade’s character, Lori,
has a lot of sex—all of it transactional,
none of it glorified. Upon arriving in New
York from Minnesota, she signs up with a
pimp named C.C. and becomes a prosti-
tute and later a porn actor. Both jobs are
detailed graphically. Before The Deuce,
Meade’s career had included several diffi-
cult sex scenes (the first, when she was 16,
involved her charac ter’s rape by an older
man)—but she had powered through
them with gritted teeth. Approaching
Season 2, however, she felt ill: She now
knew just how dense with difficult sex
The Deuce could be, and #MeToo had
brought back memories of sexual trau-
mas she had suffered in her own life.
The first time Meade worked closely
with Rodis was for a scene in which
her character travels to Los Angeles for
the Adult Film Association of America
Awards. There she meets a talent scout
named Greg, played by Ryan Farrell; they
flirt, pile into the back of his limousine,
snort some cocaine, and—fully clothed—
make out. By any standard, let alone The
Deuce’s, the scene is tame. Meade was
nonetheless anxious. She didn’t know Far-
rell, and the atmosphere on TV and movie
sets had recently grown tense. “This is
right when we came back to work, right
after Time’s Up. Everyone’s walking on
eggshells,” she told me. “Obviously any
decent man is going to feel uncomfort-
able just grabbing at my breast.” Farrell
told me that he was, in fact, concerned
about Meade’s well-being, but wasn’t sure
how to effectively convey that concern. “If
you keep telling somebody you’re not a
creep, it’s kind of creepy,” he said.
Ahead of the shoot, the episode’s direc-
tor, Steph Green, explained her vision of
the scene to Rodis, who called the actors
to run through a proposed plan. Afterward,
When Rodis first arrived
at HBO, she sensed that
some veteran actors
and directors suspected
that intimacy coordinator
was code for “censor.”character. “I’ve had to do that multiple
times, and every time it’s been either
someone inappropriately close or awk-
wardly far away,” she said. Rodis, by con-
trast, “was able to fully structure it—how
he arched his back and where he put his
hands; for him to put his mouth or his
face toward my left leg in a certain way
so it looked like he was doing that, with-
out it being in appropriate.” The goal is to
minimize, not eliminate, awkwardness.“It’s still awkward, no matter what,”
Meade said. “You have somebody’s head
in your crotch.”
Fundamental to Rodis’s approach is
her comfort talking about human bodies
and the things they can do together. “It is
a skill just to speak freely and technically
about sex scenes,” Green said, adding:
“How can we figure out where this can all
go wrong until we can talk about what it is
in the first place?” When Rodis first arrived
at HBO, such frankness wasn’t necessar-
ily what people were expecting; to the con-
trary, she sensed that some veteran actors
and directors suspected that intimacy coor-
dinator was code for “censor”—that “the
Millennials were coming to sanitize every-
thing.” Rodis is sensitive and chooses her
words carefully—she is capable of say-
ing bloodless things like “rear backside
nudity” with a straight face. But she is also,
as Meade put it, “completely down for the
raunchy silliness of it all.” This combina-
tion of candor and lightheartedness allows
everyone around her to speak frankly, too.
And that, far from sanitizing sex, enables
richer and more realistic depictions of it.I
N RETHINKING its approach to sex
scenes, HBO is motivated by more
than benevolence toward its actors. It is
scrambling to salvage an essential ele-
ment of its identity, not to mention its
bottom line, in the face of new realities.Rodis made sure that each actor’s con-
tract had a rider stipulating that Farrell
would touch Meade’s clothed breasts,
and Meade would grab Farrell’s crotch
through his pants, under which he’d be
wearing a prosthetic penis. The day of
filming, Green, Rodis, and both actors met
in private to prepare. (Green has long run
trust- and chemistry- building exercises
before intimacy scenes.) Before rehears-
ing the scene, she and Rodis asked the
actors to hold each other’s
gaze for a long interval.
The actors also took turns
inviting each other to
touch agreed-upon body
parts: hand, knee, thigh,
and so on.
When it was time to
shoot, the aforementioned
prosthetic was produced.
“It was an actual fake penis
that they use in some of
the scenes,” Farrell said.
“I was like, ‘That’s pretty
extreme!’ ” He put it in his pants. “Emily
got to actually feel it when it was on top of
me,” he said, “and when things like that
start happening, it’s an icebreaker, and
everybody loosens up a bit.”
Farrell and Meade got in the back of the
limo, together with a cameraperson, while
Rodis and Green watched the scene via
monitor. (By long-standing tradition, TV
and movie sex scenes are filmed on closed
sets, without any unnecessary people mill-
ing around.) Early in the proceedings, they
paused to fine-tune the way Farrell was
touching Meade’s breast. “His hand was
sort of flat,” Meade recalled. As a result,
Rodis said, it looked as if Farrell’s char-
acter was pinning Lori down instead of
caressing her. “If you give your hand just
a little bit of a cup to it and bring it under-
neath,” she told Farrell, “it isn’t going to
look like you’re forcing her down.” The
small adjustment didn’t require added
contact or pressure, Rodis said, but it
made the scene into “an intimate moment
and not something that he was pushing
her into.” In the context of Lori’s story line,
that was a crucial distinction. For all her
sexual encounters up to this point in the
series, this is the first one we see unfold
entirely outside her pimp’s clutches—the
first one she appears to actually want.
More graphic scenes call for different
measures. In the new season, another
actor performs oral sex on Meade’s