3 hours ago
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If you could pinpoint a moment where things change for Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), the two professional hockey players secretly hooking up in the show Heated Rivalry – a moment when the relationship breaks through into fraught emotional territory, when the hazy, undefined thing has become a thing – it would be midway through episode four.
Ilya’s couch, mid-morning, post-breakfast. (The exponentially growing fandom of this six-episode show from Canadian streamer Crave, which premiered in North America in late November with virtually no promotion and has rapidly become one of the most organic TV phenomena in recent memory, knows exactly what I’m talking about.) Hollander overhears Rozanov’s distressing phone call from home and asks how his father is (he doesn’t know Russian, but agitation needs no language); Rozanov responds by wrapping a sculpted arm around his neck. The two then get intimate, in one of the show’s many near-wordless sex scenes, culminating in them each using the other’s first name for the first time.
I could break down the precise, mesmeric choreography of this scene (trust that plenty already have) – the way that Hollander shifts from comforting Rozanov to pleasuring him, the slide from delicate to desirous, the specific placement of hands and eyes and thighs that will recall snippets of specific seared memory for many viewers. But suffice to say that in this scene, as throughout Heated Rivalry, sex is allowed to act as dialogue, a language unto itself between the characters for whom physical intimacy is their primary form of communication. That it works – that everyone from hockey bro podcasters to queer men to especially women not only understand this language but are drawn to it – is a testament to Jacob Tierney, the show’s creator, freely but faithfully adapting the romance novels by Rachel Reid, to the performances by breakout stars Williams and Storrie, to a show that takes sex seriously. And, crucially, to Chala Hunter, the intimacy coordinator and, to quote Tierney, “absolutely the hero of this show”.
I’m sure Tierney knows that’s a loaded statement. Since its formalization in the wake of the #MeToo movement, the intimacy coordinator has been playing defense. The job, at its most basic level, is to protect cast and crew in the production of intimate scenes, by working as a liaison between actors and directors, on everything from intimacy garments to past sexual trauma to movement choreography. Though it existed in some form, on rare productions, for years, it was encouraged (and, in some cases, mandated) following the outpouring of horror stories that upended Hollywood in the late 2010s; the position is now unionized with Sag-Aftra in the US and under Bectu in the UK, with qualifications for extensive training and paid credits.
In its relatively short public life, the intimacy coordinator – as an idea or representation of values, rather than an individual professional —has traced a similar arc to the #MeToo movement generally: broad praise, with a flurry of interest on the promise of a position created, in part, as a response to trauma, burnished by revelatory examples like the highly naturalistic, sensitive sex in shows like Normal People; practical struggles when, as with all things, ideas meet real life; conflation with ideologies far beyond an individual practitioner’s scope; backlash, with the position branded as onerous bureaucracy (often implicitly tied to DEI efforts) impeding artist autonomy.
Some of the opposition has been clearly rooted in misogyny. Most of it has been merely small-minded or ego-flattering – the position dismissed, downplayed or diminished based on individual experience. Mikey Madison, who won the best actress Oscar last year for playing a sex worker in Sean Baker’s Anora, declined an intimacy coordinator because she and her scene partner “decided it would be best to just keep it small”. Jennifer Lawrence couldn’t remember if she had one while filming the psychodrama Die My Love (she did), but said it wouldn’t have been necessary because her co-star, Robert Pattinson, is “not pervy” and “very in love” with his real-life partner. Lawrence’s rationale echoed that of Jennifer Aniston, who said she rejected a third party on the set of the Morning Show because co-star Jon Hamm was “such a gentleman … I’m like, ‘Please, this is awkward enough!’ We’re seasoned – we can figure this one out.” And then there’s Gwyneth Paltrow, who caused a bit of stir by seeming, in very Gwyneth fashion, above it all; by her telling, she told the intimacy coordinator on Marty Supreme to “step back” because she is from “from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on” and so “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.”
One detects a chill in the air. To be clear, I have no doubt that some actors have had negative experiences with intimacy coordinators, just as I have no doubt that as job is, in and of itself, an unqualified good. In the words of Florence Pugh, the actor with, to date, the most honest and considered take on the matter, intimacy coordination is “still figuring itself out”. As with any profession, there are some people who are excellent at it, and some who are not. Pugh cited “a shit example where someone just made it so weird and so awkward and really wasn’t helpful”. But it was working with a “fantastic” coordinator when she realized, “‘Oh, this is what I’ve been missing, understanding the dance of intimacy’ as opposed to just shooting a sex scene.”
That dance is, I think, the element missing from so much overblown and decontextualized “debate” over the role, and part of what makes Heated Rivalry so refreshing. So much of the focus on intimacy coordinators boils the position down to an object – a bridge between cast and crew, a bulwark against exploitation, a stopgap for miscommunications. And that is, for sure, part of the job. But it misses the potential for artistry – the breaking down of a scene, line by line, for a simulation of sex with the exactitude and ambition of a physical stunt. The collaboration with inexperienced actors to so understand the beats of an intimate scene that it allows for play. (“We really had a joyful experience as a production,” Hunter, the intimacy coordinator for Heated Rivalry, told Vulture. “It’s a gift to work with actors who surprise themselves – and surprise you.”) The intentionality that differentiates between a sex scene where, say, two rival hockey players get naked, and a chapter in a larger story about power dynamics, fantasy and the evolution of personal desire.
Plenty of viewers have flocked to Heated Rivalry for the promise of sex. But in a cultural landscape where porn is ubiquitous but adult-oriented storytelling scarce, many have stayed for the narrative explorations in that sex. The sex scenes in Heated Rivalry exemplify difference between the pornographic – the mere display of sex and nudity – and the erotic, imbuing such graphic visuals with, as in real life, plot, character, idiosyncratic decisions, internal motivations. The intensity of Rozanov’s gaze and grip, as opposed to merely body meeting body. Hunter’s work as an intimacy coordinator is, at core, to safely simulate the irreducible and specific relationship between two people, the unadulterated moments of connection, in whatever shifting emotional valence, that we usually never see. That Heated Rivalry does so convincingly offers the best defense yet of the job.
