Sean Bean says intimacy coordinators ‘spoil spontaneity’

Game of Thrones actor Sean Bean says intimacy coordinators “spoil the spontaneity” of filming a sex scene.

“It would inhibit me more because it draws attention to things,” said Bean, who played Ned Stark on the hit fantasy show, of an in-room intimacy coordinator. “Someone who says, ‘Do that, put your hands there while you touch their thing…’

“I think the natural behavior of lovers would be ruined if someone reduced it to a technical exercise,” he added, comparing his experience to the raunchy 1993 adaptation of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, in which he starred opposite Joely Richardson played along.

“‘Lady Chatterly’ was spontaneous,” Bean said in his interview with Britain’s Times Magazine. “It was a pleasure. We had good chemistry between us and we knew what we were doing was unusual. Because she was married, I was married. But we followed the story. We have tried to present the truth of what DH Lawrence wrote.”

Bean also condemned the censorship of his work at the behest of television companies or advertisers, citing the television series Snowpiercer, in which he currently stars, in which he filmed a nude scene alongside Lena Hall. In the bizarre scene of Season 2, the duo becomes intimate with the help of a mango (as in the fruit). But Bean said, “I think they actually excised a little bit. Often the best work you do, where you try to push the boundaries and is inherently experimental, is censored when TV companies or advertisers say it is as much. It’s a beautiful scene, quite surreal, dreamlike and abstract. And mango-like.”

When the interviewer pointed out that intimacy coordinators can help protect actors after #MeToo, Bean replied, “I suppose it depends on the actress. This [referring to Hall] came from a musical cabaret background, so she was up for anything.”

Hall has acted in Broadway productions of shows such as Kinky Boots, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Cats, among others.

In the interview, Bean, who played Boromir in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings franchise, also turned his attention to fan conventions, describing an (unnamed) LOTR convention as “just a cattle fair” when he attended as a guest .

“I didn’t like how the organizers treated the fans,” he said, explaining that he was cut off by staff when he tried to text alongside signing autographs. “They would say, ‘No, no, just a signature. He has to pay more for you to text.” And those fans are good-natured, positive people who’ve been thrown around and overwhelmed with things.”

Bean said he will not be attending future fan conventions.