Intimacy Coordinator ITA O’BRIEN on It's a Sin, Sex Education & Creating Safe Spaces

How can intimate scenes be brought to the screen in ways that respect the emotional well-being and privacy of the artists themselves? How do we make sure that we can create a story about abuse without anyone being abused in the process?

Ita O’Brien is the UK’s leading Intimacy Coordinator, founder of Intimacy on Set (and author of the Intimacy On Set Guidelines). Her company, set up in 2018 provides services to TV, film, and theatre when dealing with intimacy, and is a SAG-Aftra accredited training provider of Intimacy Practitioners. Intimacy on Set has supported numerous high-profile film and TV productions including Normal People & Conversations With Friends (BBC3/Hulu), Sex Education 1&2 (Netflix), I May Destroy You (BBC/HBO), It’s A Sin (Channel 4), (Neal Street Prods / Searchlight Pictures).

It's a Sin - Telling Stories About the HIV/AIDS crisis:

"That production was really close to my heart because I was a musical theater dancer in the eighties and so that whole storytelling was something that I personally had lived through and really understood. You know, I was that kid at the Pineapple Dance Studios. And gradually, as friends around me sort of began to become unwell, and actually, one of the first people that I knew who died from HIV was my singing teacher at the time, a guy called Chris Edwards. He was the first person that contracted HIV that I knew, and he died within 18 months. So Russell T. Davies. Peter Hoar, the amazing director, and myself were of the generation who had lived through this, but for the young cast it was something that was about history, so that work of really exploring it was important. And also then, there was a cast member for whom the experience of HIV was a lived experience. I worked with two fantastic intimacy practitioners who were both under mentorship at that point in time, Elle McAlpine and David Thackeray."

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