I cannot, for the life of me, understand this trend among actors of a certain generation turning up their noses and giving the middle finger to intimacy coordinators. Kim Basinger, Sean Bean, Jennifer Aniston, and Michael Douglas, just to name a few, have all balked at the position in recent years, claiming to be from a long-gone era when actors didn’t need such frivolous on-set protections. Mikey Madison also shared that she said “no” to an intimacy coordinator on the set of Anora.
Now, Gwyneth Paltrow, the actress who helped launch the MeToo movement, has joined the chorus.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Paltrow divulges some details about her and Timothée Chalamet’s new film, Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s A24 follow-up to Uncut Gems. “I mean, we have a lot of sex in this movie,” Paltrow says of her and Chalamet’s respective characters. “There’s a lot—a lot.”
And since this is Paltrow’s first real starring role in about 15 years, she was apparently shocked at how different film sets have become. “There’s now something called an intimacy coordinator, which I did not know existed,” she told the magazine. She added that when Marty’s on-set coordinator asked if she was OK with something, she replied, “‘Girl, I’m from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on.’” Cool girl alert?
Ultimately, she and Chalamet didn’t use their intimacy coordinator. “We said, ‘I think we’re good. You can step a little bit back,’” Paltrow said. “I don’t know how it is for kids who are starting out, but…if someone is like, ‘Okay, and then he’s going to put his hand here,’ I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that.”
Not even five paragraphs later, Paltrow recalls the unregulated filming conditions of the 1990s. Describing her as “naive to labor protections,” the magazine says Paltrow had no idea she shouldn’t be filming “six days a week, up to 20 hours a day, sometimes getting called back four hours after wrapping.” And when she asked for a 12-hour day? The producers “granted” it but made her feel bad.
“It was such a horrible feeling,” she said, saying she imagined one of the producers “crafting a story that I’m being difficult…and of course you didn’t say anything, because you could already tell that the guy with the power was like, ‘I don’t like what I’m seeing here.’”
I would like to imagine that an actress with over three decades in the industry, who has plenty of anecdotes of bad sets and toxic work environments, and whose allegations against Harvey Weinstein in 2017 were crucial in launching the MeToo movement would, at the very least, understand why an intimacy coordinator might be an important addition to a film set—even if she herself has garnered enough power in the industry to speak up when she feels uncomfortable without fearing she’s being “difficult.” Alas!
And like a sugar-free, $300 Goop cherry on top, Paltrow also spends part of the interview waxing poetic about how maybe her life’s purpose is to “pave the way” for others.
“I feel like more than being a successful actress or being a part of #MeToo, or being one of the first actresses to launch a lifestyle brand, and I haven’t fully fleshed this out yet, so I’m sort of saying this to you as I’m thinking it for the first time, but it might just be that my role is to pave the way,” she said. “By some instinct or curiosity or desire, I go somewhere and I hack through the path and I get the scratches of hacking through, but I make space for other people, then, to do it.” She concluded with, “That’s the point of my life, maybe?” Sure, Jan.
Gwyneth, send me an email and I will personally see to it that you receive a copy of Make It Look Real, the new intimacy coordinator documentary out of SXSW to help people like you understand the need for intimacy coordinators.
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