Have you seen those pesky viral tweets about sex scenes?
“Sex scenes are unnecessary in film/series,” this particular post claims. “No plot point has been driven by a good sex scene or has there ever been a film made better by a sex scene.” The tweet has racked up a whopping 12.3 thousand retweets cheering it on—but also, 14.6 thousand quote tweets shooting down its incel hypothesis.
If Alison Oliver had a Twitter account, she probably would be one of the latter thousands refuting the post. The Conversations With Friends star is a fierce advocate for intimate scenes—which is important, because her new adaptation of Sally Rooney’s debut novel has so many. They make a strong case for themselves alone, but Oliver has a whip-smart understanding of their presence.
“Sally tends to write characters that often really struggle with communication and finding a language to describe what they actually feel,” Oliver tells The Daily Beast. “It’s a really big thing for her characters, for their relationships. Intimacy is such a massive part of how they communicate. You’ll have lots of scenes where they’re like, ‘I don’t know what to say to you.’ And then they sleep together and it’s fine.”
Oliver chuckles after that last bit, but her explanation is spot on. Moreover, the presence of “authentic” sex scenes in Conversations (and the Rooneyverse predecessor Normal People, for that matter) is “moving,” the actress explains. “You can show intimate scenes on TV that are really enjoyable and consensual and joyful,” she continues. “They’re just as important as dialogue scenes.”
That’s the not-so-secret ingredient of Conversations With Friends, which boasts plenty of aspects other than sex scenes that’ll invite you to breeze through all 12 episodes on Hulu. In fact, Oliver’s grounded performance is perhaps the most alluring part of the series. In Conversations, she stars as Frances, a misguided twentysomething finishing up at university and struggling to carve out a new career path for herself. Lost and lonely, Frances seeks refuge in her mentor’s boyfriend, Nick (Joe Alwyn), beginning a dangerous affair.
The role is a tricky one—Frances can be vapid, dull, ignorant, rude—but Oliver excels. “She’s so easy to imagine,” she says. As a recent college graduate, she explains that she relates to Frances’ “universal” coming-of-age struggles. She handles Frances with grace, a character who views her relationships (romantic, platonic, or both at the same time) as fluid, ever-changing parts of her life.
“I’d actually read the book before I’d auditioned or anything, so I had a previous relationship to that character, in a sense,” Oliver says. “I just thought this stage of her life that she’s at—that progression into adulthood from university—was one I really recognized, in terms of, ‘Okay, now I’m an adult in the world. What’s my place? Who do I want to be?’”
Apart from Nick, Frances has an intimate bond with her best friend, Bobbi (played by Sasha Lane), who also happens to be her ex-girlfriend. The pair don’t seem to have their relationship figured out quite yet. They are roommates, rely on one another as partners would, and know everything about each other—they just don’t kiss or sleep together anymore. (Not at the beginning of the series, at least.)
“That kind of intense female friendship was one I really was drawn to,” Oliver says. “Sally writes female relationships incredibly well, that innate understanding or connection that we have. I just found the whole thing compelling and interesting.”
If Oliver is Conversations’ body, constantly moving around to keep the show in flux, Sasha Lane as Bobbi serves as the show’s heart, pumping fresh love and life into every tender scene in which she appears. The pair’s chemistry intertwines as two intimate people might under soft linen sheets on a summer day. They clash up against one another, fold into one, make each other sweat.
Oliver says we have the first days of production to thank for those deeply intimate scenes. She and Lane became close confidantes as they shot a flurry of apartment scenes in one go. When Oliver speaks about Lane, it’s as if they’re two college best friends—her face lights up, her voice brighter than ever as she sings the praises of her new acting pal.
“We became inseparable in those couple of weeks,” she recalls. “That was so important, because when you come to the story y0u meet them straight off the bat as, ‘Oh, there’s so much history there already.’ I think it was so important for us to really feel like we had a bond by the time you first come to meet them in the story. That’s how we developed that.”
But there was more than Bobbi. Oliver had to form a complex relationship with Alwyn as Nick, which is far different from the one she shares with her ex/now best friend. While Bobbi sees straight through Frances’ youthful ignorance, Nick sees her as a sanctuary away from his overly-mature wife.
“I found that really interesting, that we could explore that too, of how the different sides of a relationship would bring out different qualities of intimacy,” Oliver says.
To help out in that department, Conversations hired Ita O’Brien, the same intimacy coordinator who worked on Normal People. That intimacy coordinators is still a relatively new thing and shows like Conversations used to film sex scenes without them is “so mad,” Oliver says.
“In terms of the difficulty of it, it’s probably always the initial stuff of the embarrassment in the beginning of, like, ‘Oh, god. We’re doing this,’” she continues. Luckily, director Lenny Abrahamson—who also worked on Normal People (notice a pattern?)—encouraged the actors to embrace “the weirdness of it” from the start. “When you have someone like that, it really, really puts you at ease, more so than someone to make light of it.”
Aside from Abrahamson and O’Brien, Oliver’s biggest guides were her co-stars. Stranded in Belfast with no connections, the four leads all got really close, lending to the show’s intensely personal disposition.
“We just lived out of each other’s pockets for those six months,” Oliver says. “When you’re spending that much time with people and really getting to know them, as well as working with them, I think that chemistry or connection just comes from so much contact.”
The one thing that Oliver can’t quite figure out yet? Fame. While her three co-stars have all had big breakthroughs, Oliver’s career is just taking off. It’s a position Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones were in when Normal People was released two years ago, before the success of that series skyrocketed them to fame.
“I try not to think about it too much,” she concludes. “I auditioned for this show nearly two years ago now, so it's been a part of my life for so long. I’m just so excited to see what people think, talking to people like yourself or my friends and my family. I feel really lucky that I got to do it.”
