“House of the Dragon” star Olivia Cooke weighed in on the status of sex scenes in Hollywood, acknowledging that intimacy is part of the human experience but that women are still being labeled as “difficult” for speaking up when a scene causes them discomfort.
“It’s amazing to me that people had to just fudge their way through those scenes before those people existed,” Cooke said of intimacy coordinators in an interview with The I Paper in promotion of Prime Video’s “The Girlfriend,” which tasks the 31-year-old actress with intimate scenes.
The actress shared that certain sequences can place actors in “really precarious and vulnerable situations,” noting that some who might just be starting their career may not be able to articulate their discomfort in the moment, especially women.
“And for women, who’ll often get labelled ‘difficult’ or ‘a b—ch’ for speaking up,” Cooke said, adding that good intimacy coordinators will be able to notice an actor’s “hesitation and become your voice” when an actor is uneasy.
She expressed Hollywood productions should facilitate intimate scenes in such a way that actors don’t feel like “a chunk of yourself as been taken”
Cooke stars as Queen Alicent Hightower on “House of the Dragon,” HBO’s “Game of Thrones” spinoff series. While Cooke didn’t cite the series while discussing the importance of intimacy coordinators during scripted sex scenes, she isn’t the first actress from the franchise to comment on how emotionally taxing sex scenes can be.
During an interview on the podcast “Armchair Expert,” Emilia Clarke, who starred as Daenerys Targaryen in “Game of Thrones,” said she “cried like a baby” when she was asked to go nude for a scene.
“I’d been on the set for 10 days and I was being asked to take my clothes off in front of all these people,” Clarke said at the time. “I have no idea what I’m doing, I have no idea what any of this is. I cried like a baby, and I couldn’t stop crying.”
She later shared that her co-star Jason Momoa help comfort her while filming the moment.
“He took care of me in an environment I didn’t know I needed to be taken care of in,” Clarke said.
