Jane Fonda would have loved to have an intimacy coordinator during the early days of her career.
“Every time you begin a movie, you have training. What to do if there’s a problem. That never happened,” the actress, 87, said to Women’s Wear Daily on Saturday, May 24, while attending the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. “The other thing, they’re called intimacy coordinators. I wish we had them while I was doing sex scenes because it’s hard.”
Fonda noted that filming those more risqué moments can be tough to navigate for the actors performing the scenes. The Oscar winner explained that in the past she found it difficult to stay in a scene while also, for instance, having to remind her costar not to “uncover” a potion of her “breast.”
An intimacy coordinator role has become a standard practice in the TV and film industry following the Me Too movement. The intimacy coordinator typically works with actors and directors to ensure that NSFW scenes are handled safely and ethically. The coordinator choreographs intimate scenes, facilitates communication and provides support to actors during the process.
This isn’t the first time that Fonda has publicly shared her support for intimacy coordinators and how she wished their support was available in the past.
During a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Fonda confessed that having an intimacy coordinator in her corner would have helped her in some of her more uncomfortable moments while filming.
“What a difference it would’ve made in terms of my comfort,” she told the outlet. “I missed out on that one. It’s hard even to describe the difference when you’re the only [woman] on a set, literally the only.”
While Fonda wishes that she had the opportunity to work with an intimacy coordinator, there are others in the industry who don’t share her sentiments. Earlier this year, Gwyneth Paltrow made headlines for her comments about the use of intimacy coordinators for her and Timothée Chalamet’s upcoming movie, Marty Supreme.
Jane Fonda gave a powerful speech while accepting the Life Achievement Award at the 2025 Screen Actors Guild Awards. Fonda, 87, took the stage at the Sunday, February 23, event, held at Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall in Los Angeles, after being presented with the honor by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. “Wow. This means the world to […]
“There’s now something called an intimacy coordinator, which I did not know existed,” Paltrow said in a March interview with Vanity Fair while noting that an intimacy coordinator on set asked if she’d be comfortable with a particular position. “I was like, ‘Girl, I’m from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on.’”
Paltrow shared that she and Chalamet opted not to use the coordinator.
“We said, ‘I think we’re good. You can step a little bit back,’” Paltrow recalled to the outlet. “I don’t know how it is for kids who are starting out, but … if someone is like, ‘OK, and then he’s going to put his hand here’ … I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that.’”
