What Does an Intimacy Coordinator Do on a Movie With Real Sex?

Most of the time we hear about intimacy coordinators, it’s in the context of filmmakers and actors talking about why they don’t need them. That rejection, however, is based on the traditional understanding of the role, and our conception of intimacy coordinators—what they do, and why they’ve become such a hot-button issue—is turned on its head by the new film The Visitor, where the sex is entirely real and unsimulated.

The relatively new role of intimacy coordinator—IC for short—sprung up on film and TV sets in the wake of the #MeToo movement, a way to make sure that actors feel comfortable and protected filming sexual or otherwise compromising scenes. But like so many attempts at correcting power imbalance and improving workplace safety, intimacy coordinators typically make headlines when top-level talent are resistant to the concept, which happened most recently with newly minted Best Picture winner Anora. Both writer-director Sean Baker and star Mikey Madison explained why, while the chance to work with an IC was offered, they declined.

Anora is simply one notable example of passing on an IC. But the film makes for a pointed contrast with The Visitor, Bruce LaBruce’s extremely explicit take on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, now in theaters in New York and Los Angeles. On the posters for The Visitor, one of which showcases feet with what appear to be vulva on the soles, there’s a credit for intimacy coordinator Lidia Ravviso, right next to director of photography Jack Hamilton. It’s the first time I can remember seeing an IC credited, let alone so prominently.

“Surprisingly, Bruce really wanted to give so much attention to the role,” Ravviso told me. “There was so much to do on set that for him it was really relevant.”

What makes Ravviso’s credit even more surprising is that The Visitor is, as mentioned above, not a film with simulated sex. Faked intimate scenes are what we most associate with an intimacy coordinator: careful choreography and ample preparation to make sure it only looks like the actors onscreen are engaged in genital-to-genital (or genital-to-anything-else) contact. In The Visitor, like so many of Bruce LaBruce’s films, the sex is unsimulated, meaning that any of the genital contact we see actually happened.

And it’s also, again in line with LaBruce’s career up to this point, fairly extreme sex. As in Teorema, The Visitor focuses on the title character seducing every member of a bourgeois household. Here, the Visitor is a refugee—a perhaps literal alien played by Bishop Black—who engages the family in increasingly depraved sexual activity. As an underground queer filmmaker, LaBruce is no stranger to pushing boundaries. His latest film features a laundry list of taboos: foot fetishism, body suspension, coprophagy, and all manner of incest. While the latter two are, mercifully, fiction, the lengthy sex scenes are undeniably real.

This all may sound like quite an undertaking for an intimacy coordinator, but it wasn’t entirely new terrain for Ravviso. A film director and editor, she trained as an IC with Anica Academy ETS, Italy’s first professional intimacy coordinator training program, and Safe Sets. In addition to her work on sets, she’s led workshops on consensual practices and kink. But Ravviso also has a background uniquely suited to her role on The Visitor, as a filmmaker who has worked with feminist porn pioneer Erika Lust. It was during the making of Ravviso’s own feature The Listener, produced by Lust, that she learned about ICs.

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“Some of the aspects of the intimacy coordination on set, I was already exploring navigating ethical pornography,” she said. “So, a certain way to be on set, to navigate boundaries with the actors. It was already a conversation in [the porn] industry.”

The Visitor, however, was Ravviso’s first feature film as an IC, and her first time working as an IC (instead of as a director) on a film with actual sex. As she acknowledged, her training was tailored to simulated sex scenes—that’s true of the training intimacy coordinators go through in general, since the vast majority of movies outside of porn don’t include the real thing.

“We not only assist with the consent process, but particularly with the choreography,” she explained of the IC role. “We are trained to put in place specific techniques for choreography, [including] modesty garments.” For those not in the know, modesty garments are designed to keep actors’ most intimate anatomy covered and protected from direct contact.

So what does an intimacy coordinator do on a film with unsimulated sex? There were no modesty garments on the set of The Visitor, for example—those (deliberately) get in the way of real sexual contact. But there were still plenty of considerations to be made. Ravviso mentioned being in constant communication with the makeup and costume departments. “You make sure there are not unnecessary moments when the actor is just waiting naked,” she said. “You make sure there is a towel or anything else to cover the actor.”

It was cold on set—as it tends to be in London in April—and it didn’t help that the title character spends the sex scenes covered in a slimy liquid to emphasize his alien nature. This goo was a “not pleasant” addition to skin-to-skin contact. “I had a whole kit bag,” Ravviso shared, “from wet wipes to having a hot tea on hand, having the towels, having the slippers.”

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Of course, on any independent production, you’re required to be “multi-skilled,” Ravviso noted. For her, that meant a number of additional tasks, including cleaning the sex toys and making sure that the timing of the body suspension—that is, the time an actor spent being held up with hooks in his skin—was respected. She also recalled an incident when a nude scene filmed on an outdoor street led to police intervention, and Ravviso needed to provide some essential context. “That wasn’t really my role, but I had to deal with the police,” she said.

One of Ravviso’s most important jobs on the film was one that should hold true for intimacy coordination on any set—whether the sex is simulated or the real thing. That was creating a safe and comfortable space for the actors, who, in the case of The Visitor, were in unusually vulnerable positions.

“Yes, it’s explicit, they’re naked, but particularly with The Visitor, there was a very strong emotional charge in the scenes,” Ravviso said. “And there were some of the actors [where it was the] first time they were having sex on screen. So I was making sure the emotional and psychological well-being of the actor was constantly checked—before, during the scene, and afterwards.”

Given the nature of the film and the scope of Ravviso’s responsibilities, the benefit of employing an IC seems fairly straightforward. But for those familiar with LaBruce’s work, which is designed to be transgressive and button-pushing, it’s perhaps surprising to learn that he would so readily embrace the role. As it turns out, The Visitor was his second time working with an intimacy coordinator. The first was on 2022’s The Affairs of Lidia, an Erika Lust-produced porn film, and his experience was challenging.

In a 2023 conversation with Interview, LaBruce shared that his first IC, who had only worked on mainstream movies, was not useful to him. “I kept on having to explain to her how sex is represented, how it’s portrayed differently in explicit movies, what the kind of ethical boundaries are, which are different,” he said. “I always argue, you need a stronger kind of ethical or moral compass in porn than in mainstream movies, because it is such a land mine of people being really intimate with each other and it’s very rife for exploitation.”

When Ravviso joined The Visitor, she knew of LaBruce’s feelings about his prior work with an IC. She admitted that she was scared on her first day, but said that she and the director ended up forming an easy bond. According to her, it helped that her background in intimacy coordination came from a genuine interest in cinema and in pornography. And she was “fluid” working with a filmmaker “with a very strong artistic vision”—though she was also quick to praise his kindness and respect on set.

LaBruce has shown his appreciation for what Ravviso brought to the project beyond making sure she was credited on the film’s poster. He has spoken highly of her since their collaboration, including in the Interview piece. “She was so amazing,” he told the magazine of Ravviso. “She wasn’t policing anything, she wasn’t interested in that. She was more like part-sexual therapist, just providing an atmosphere on set that is conducive to sexuality, where everyone is comfortable.”

I asked Ravviso if the “part-sexual therapist” designation resonated with her, and she noted that she doesn’t have a degree in psychology or any of the requisite training to be seeing and working with patients. In a slightly less literal sense, however, the way she talks about what she does sheds light on LaBruce’s assessment.

For her work on The Visitor, she mentioned using skills outside of what she learned in her IC training program. “I have developed some knowledge in terms of dealing with anxiety or stressful experiences,” she said. “I have my little tool kit, from exercises to whatever, that I use to not be a sex therapist, but someone who tries to create a comfortable work environment for the people involved.”

Even with the background and training Ravviso brought to The Visitor, the film was clearly a learning experience that encouraged adaptability. Intimacy coordinators usually see a script before filming begins so they can flag and begin preparing for any scenes that might require extra care. That “risk assessment” work done ahead of time couldn’t happen in this case, with a script that wasn’t quite detailed to allow for all the ins and outs of sex—both figuratively and literally.

At the same time, Ravviso stressed, the sex wasn’t spontaneous, no matter how free-flowing it might look on screen. There was always a beat-by-beat discussion beforehand designed to make sure everyone identified their personal boundaries and was fully comfortable with what was about to happen. If there were requests for changes mid-scene, Ravviso had the authority to stop and reconnect with the actors.

“I never felt that we were just throwing the actor in the scene without having discussed with them and having enthusiastic consent from all of them,” she explained.

Hearing an IC talk about their work emphasizes the degree to which it is work. As much joy as there is to creative expression and to sex, there’s also an essential tedium. But as Ravviso pointed out, this is work that it also being done on porn sets, where there may be a different but similar protocol to establish guidelines that protect performers. While the debate over the need for intimacy coordinators on sets is likely to continue—even as a younger generation pushes back on sex in film and television more broadly—more education on the role could shift the conversation. For its part, The Visitor serves as a relentlessly raunchy reminder that an IC need not sanitize or restrict.

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“The misconception is that you are there to police the director’s vision, that you might convince the actors there’s a problem where actually there’s no problem,” Ravviso said. “We have heard actors saying, ‘No, I don’t need an intimacy coordinator.’ Maybe they’re not aware of the dynamic of power that changes from set to set, from relationship to relationship. So why not have it? That’s the question.”