Michael Douglas says he thinks intimacy coordinators are just executives who ‘take control away from the filmmakers’

Two-time Academy Award-winning actor Michael Douglas (Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, Ant man) expressed his opinion on intimacy coordinators on film sets.

The job involves a coordinator who works with actors and producers during the filming of sensitive, intimate scenes in a film or series, and productions have only just started having them regularly in the last 10 to 15 years, well past the point of the peak full of Douglas sex scenes. of his career.

But Douglas said he believes intimacy coordinators hinder the directors’ process. In a recent interview with Radio Times, via The Telegraph, the actor explained:

“I’m past the age where I have to worry about this. But it’s interesting with all intimacy coordinators. It seems like executives are taking control away from directors, but there have been some terrible missteps and harassment.

He continued:

“The sex scenes are like fight scenes, it’s all choreographed. In my experience, you take responsibility as a man to make sure the woman is comfortable with him, you talk about it. You say, “Okay, I’ll touch you here if that’s okay.” It’s very slow but it feels like it’s happening organically, which is hopefully what good acting is all about.

Douglas acknowledges that on-set misconduct during intimate scenes is a real problem, adding:

“I’m sure there were people who overstepped their boundaries, but before, we seemed to be dealing with it ourselves. They would earn a reputation and that would take care of them… But I talked to the women, [because] I made some of those sex movies – sex movies – and now we joke about what it would have been like to have an intimacy coordinator working with us…”

So someone would get a bad reputation after assaulting a woman, or multiple women, and then get less work? Douglas’ solution seems too little, too late, and like a pat on the hand for men who were never given real consequences.

And as for him joking about what it would be like to have an intimacy coordinator on set, I bet that would have been more than cool. Considering Douglas’ age and how times have changed since he made films that would require an intimacy coordinator, perhaps his opinion of him doesn’t really matter.