An intimacy coordinator oversees the sex scenes on a movie set, making sure the actors are comfortable and no boundaries are being exploited. It’s a fairly recent job, at least within the film industry, conceived as a response to the #MeToo movement. Since the creation of the position, there have been sporadic headlines about big names questioning the worth of intimacy coordinators, or refusing to engage with them. Other actors have expressed gratitude for their presence, and wishes that they had been around earlier in their careers.
Lena Headey, best known for playing Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones, is in the latter camp. She wrote (working from an idea by Erika Lust), directed and starred in Intimacy, the new eight-part audio drama from Arc. In Intimacy, Headey plays Liza, an intimacy coordinator called in as a replacement on the set of a big-budget adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which is shooting in Greece. After she gets there, she discovers the director is Gary (Tom Goodman-Hill), a man who raped her 25 years earlier when she was still an actor. In dire need of the money and career boost that comes with the job, she decides to do her best at carrying on and not saying anything, but when she sees Gary take an unhealthy interest in the film’s young star, Bunny (Maisie Williams), that soon becomes impossible.
Headey has been acting in movies since the early nineties, and her knowledge of how a film set works lends Intimacy an effortless authenticity. You trust that she knows of what she speaks, and in a show that’s this frenetic, that’s especially important. The episodes are only around fifteen minutes long, which means overall this series is – appropriately – about the length of a typical movie. Each instalment is a hectic affair, with Liza’s concerns about the actors comfort and safety butting up against Gary’s desire to get each scene shot as quickly as possible. That, combined with Max Perryment’s pulsating bop of a score, make it all a pacy listen.
That being said, perhaps the series could have done with being just a touch less pacy. Because there’s such little time in each episode, there’s not a lot of room here for real depth; each of the characters is there to stand for something (the vulnerable ingenue, the out-of-touch mother, the arrogant director) rather than to exist as a dimensional being. Ironically, the excellent cast only underlines the flatness of characterization; it feels like a greater wrong to have actors like Alison Steadman and Hannah Waddingham to hand, and yet give them so little to do. And while showing Liza’s struggle to balance her work stress with her home stress makes sense in regards to her character, the subplot around her ex and his new baby is just too much for this story to handle in a satisfying way.
Yet, Intimacy still manages to do an awful lot with the runtime it has. As both writer and performer, Headey gives Liza a distinctive, appealing voice: spikily mordant when it comes to the behaviour she had to contend with, but overflowing with concern towards her charges. That balance between dark humour and earnestly acknowledging the stakes of the situation extends out over the whole production, which thrums with frustration about the safety of women so often being treated as secondary in importance to getting a movie made. There’s such an electricity to that righteous anger that it renders Intimacy’s flaws, if not moot, then much less important than they might otherwise have been.
Headey has expressed an eagerness to revisit Liza, and the ending of Intimacy certainly leaves the door open. Fingers crossed that the podcast does make a return, just with longer episodes this time.
