Hair and makeup professionals are not paid enough to also be acting therapists, nor are they trained to do so. A growing wave of intimacy coordinators are.
Amanda Edwards has been an intimacy coordinator in film, television and theater since 2020, but is also a licensed therapist. Because of this background, he was asked to provide mental health care to people on the set. Just as he would have to grapple with how to portray an intimate sex scene properly and with proper consent, directors and producers asked him to mitigate mental health crises when filming other intense scenes.
“The productions were asking me, how can we portray this responsibly? How can we minimize the harm to our performers, to our audience members?” Edwards told IndieWire. “I was doing mental health crisis mitigation not just for the cast members who were performing the thing, but also for the cast members of the crew who had to see it happen again and again, sometimes with their own lived experience.”
She realized “very quickly” that what she wasn’t doing wasn’t intimacy coordination; “This is a different job.” And while not everyone in the field is also a therapist, she wasn’t the only one asked to pull double duty.
So she came up with a name for her new job: mental health coordinator.
“Coordinating intimacy is nudity, simulated sex, and acts that feel intimate to the performers. And yes, that can include some emotionally charged material, absolutely,” Edwards explained. “But mental health coordination work goes far beyond the consent and practice of interpreter boundaries.”
A mental health coordinator, as Edwards describes, is someone who provides care and emotional support to those who need it on set during difficult times while filming. The torture scenes are, without a doubt, one of the ones he has had to deal with. Depictions of child abuse, addiction or substance abuse, suicide attempts or sexual assault are also difficult. She’s there for the actors who need to play those heavy scenes, but also for the boom operator who has to hear screams in his headset over and over, or the cameraman who might have an unexpected trigger.
“We constantly get feedback that ‘I don’t know why we’ve been trying to do this without you all this time.’ We’re so grateful you’re here,” Edwards said.
The work of mental health coordinators is still largely unaccredited. But a growing number of independent productions and episodic studio projects are slowly looking for ways to provide mental care to their teams. So Edwards, who has worked on projects for HBO, ABC and other indies, is the founder of the Association of Mental Health Coordinators (AMHC), an organization that certifies mental health coordinators, providing training and resources for intimacy coordinators and others who wish. expand into mental health. Their 10-week course only accepts people who are already licensed mental health professionals (AMHPs) who want to learn to work on film and television sets. About 20 people are currently certified in the first round of Edwards, but there are others in Hollywood who do mental health coordinator work without formal certification.
Edwards sometimes wears the hats of both an intimacy coordinator and a mental health coordinator, but it’s not easy, and she and others in her field believe the two should be considered separate jobs. As the intimacy coordinator, she must focus on the monitors and be in tune with the performers. But that’s a challenge when potentially dozens of other people on set need attention.
The good news is that performers and filmmakers are beginning to recognize the need for both roles. Actress Alyson Stoner recently said on her “Dear Hollywood” podcast that MHCs should be essential whenever there is a minor on set. Anne Hathaway didn’t mention the specific role, but recently said it was a blessing to have an intimacy coordinator who also cares about her mental health in addition to intimate scenes in her upcoming film “Mother Mary.”
“[It’s] someone there who makes sure, in a moment of vulnerability, when you’re showing something true and sacred about yourself, that you’re not going to get hurt,” Hathaway told Vanity Fair.
Intimacy coordinators began to rise alongside the #MeToo movement. Finally, actors put their foot down to prevent abuses of power on set and protect actors when they are most vulnerable. It has caused a noticeable change in the industry with more movies and shows including sex in their storylines. And that’s why intimacy coordinators are the first to beat the drum for the mental health professionals who work alongside them.
“Statistically, when you have a traumatic or emotionally charged moment in a script, you’re going to have a cast or crew member who has that lived experience in the room,” Edwards said. “There’s often a moment of realization of ‘oh yeah, we should probably have a safety net to back them up, just in case’. In my mind, it just makes sense.”
Olivia Troy is one of the founding members of Reps on Set, an organization that represents intimacy coordinators like her, but also trained mental health coordinators. Having worked on shows like “Billions” and “Bonding” and specializing in intimate scenes involving BDSM, she is often consulted for script review and determining the best person for the job or jobs. Sometimes this involves finding someone trained to work with older actors, trans performers, or people of different races. But it also includes mental health.
Their job and training is to support intimate scenes, help actors feel comfortable, choreograph, make sure consent is followed, or even keep an actor’s breath fresh. But this is not the same as mental health support.
“Let’s say you’re doing a scene of sexual violence—as an intimacy coordinator, I can choreograph it really well, I can find choreography that’s repeatable and tells the story that’s within the actor’s boundaries,” she said. Troy. “But that has nothing to do with what the actor might be going through mentally and emotionally to do that scene over and over and over again.”
Troy says to think of it like a sports therapist; they’re not there for the cast and crew (or, by analogy, the athlete) to lie on a couch and talk about their parents, but they can pop in like a doctor to help a performer decompress between scenes. They provide a space to talk and keep everyone productive and present on set, and if done right, it makes everything more efficient. She says there are many new filmmakers who understand the value of mental health support in the workplace, and for them, it’s a no-brainer.
“Sometimes it’s like, ‘Oh my god, I’m so excited about this.’ That would be great. I didn’t even know this existed. Yes, please,’” said Troy, who has heard from customers.
There is also a key difference between a mental health coordinator and an on-set therapist. A mental health co-ordinator is there to support the mental wellbeing of everyone involved. What is not individual therapy to treat a specific mental illness. Some individual actors, like Lady Gaga in “House of Gucci,” may ask for someone who can meet their needs. But mental health coordinators are there to provide grounding strategies or help stabilize actors for the benefit of the entire production.
Brooke M. Haney, the author and editor of a new book called “The Intimacy Coordinator’s Guidebook,” isn’t a mental health coordinator, but she developed a method she called the Actor’s Warm Down to allow performers to focus better after intense scenes. . As an actor, every class he took taught him how to reach a place of deep honesty and emotional intensity. But they never taught him how to put it back on.
“As much as you intellectually tell yourself that what I’m doing is fake, when you put your body in a position of fear or terror or you’re the perpetrator, you put yourself in a power-hungry place,” Haney said. . “Your body doesn’t know it’s fake. Your body experiences it as if it’s real because you put it in that position.”
While some people still see Intimacy Coordinators as the quote-unquote consent police, others see them as creative collaborators who can help choreograph a scene with a specific experience. MHCs can also help act out suicide scenes or be sensitive to certain triggers, at least for productions that are open to them.
“Not every director or studio wants that,” Edwards said. “I’m a big fan of not inserting myself where I’m not wanted or needed. Like if someone tells me it’s okay, I’m going to step back and be there to hold space if someone’s not okay.”
But Haney also believes mental health coordinators can have practical and creative value. Time and time again we’ve heard of actors freaking out or freaking out, and having someone there to prevent a mental health crisis can go a long way.
“It’s just about taking care of the people we work with,” Haney said. “From a production and business standpoint, it will save time, which will save you money. When someone isn’t in a mental health crisis, if you put in place ways for people to take care of themselves, it’s going to be very helpful and allow actors to have a sustainable career.”
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