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Ever since “The Idol” premiered earlier this month, there’s been much critique about its sexual material, including a scene in the premiere episode where pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) decides to flash her nipples during a photoshoot, despite the nudity rider in her contract.
In the scene, her intimacy coordinator (played by Scott Turner Schofield) immediately interrupts the shoot for her album cover and reminds the photographer (Eddy Chen) about the nudity rider, which only permits Jocelyn to show her “side-boob, under-boob and side flank.” He emphasizes that the contract has been reviewed by “the label and her people,” and that any changes require the photo session to be delayed 48 hours, even though Jocelyn took it upon herself to expose her breasts.
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She asks the coordinator, “I’m not allowed to show my body?”, who then responds, “Not in the general human rights structure of it all.”
Then, Jocelyn’s manager Chaim (Hank Azaria) gets involved — he shoves the coordinator behind a door and pays a random passerby $5,000 to keep him locked in the bathroom until the shoot is over.
While the scene depicts a fictional coordinator, the information about the structure surrounding intimacy coordination wasn’t necessarily inaccurate, as per a real-life intimacy coordinator named Marci Liroff — with no connection to “The Idol” — who evaluated the scene for Variety.
“To be honest, I had a very visceral reaction. I was appalled,” Liroff — whose credits as an intimacy coordinator include “Hightown”, “From Scratch”, and “This Is Us” — told the outlet.
“I’m not alone in this, in terms of my intimacy coordinator communities: We look at HBO as our stalwart home, so to speak, because their work with Alicia Rodis was so good that they made it mandatory that all projects on HBO [featuring sexually intimate scenes] must hire in an intimacy coordinator,” she said, referring to the first-ever intimacy coordinator who was hired for a major U.S. production — “The Deuce” — in 2018. “It set a standard, and many other streamers and networks have followed along. So I felt really betrayed that they were making fun of us and the job. They were using us as the butt of the joke.”
However, intimacy coordination is still a relatively new field and, despite “The Idol”‘s “heightened” depiction of it, it somewhat resonates with Liroff.
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“I have been in some situations where there’s a lot of pushback from a director or producer who doesn’t quite understand what we bring to a set,” she said. “Our position is very similar to a stunt coordinator, and you would never do some of the stuff that [has been done to me] to a stunt coordinator. So I sat with it and I realized that this actually was a very accurate — although heightened and extreme — depiction of some of the crazy pushback that I’ve experienced.”
Liroff then broke down intimacy coordinators’ job, beginning with conducting meetings with the people in charge of a project.
“In this case, probably the photographer and her manager to find out what they’re looking for,” she said of the series, which also stars The Weeknd. “I’d drill down and get very specific about what body points we are going to be seeing.”
After that, a one-on-one meeting occurs between the intimacy coordinator and the performer to determine what the talent is comfortable with. If their boundaries don’t align with a director’s requests, further meetings take place until a solution is reached in the talent’s best interest, to which a nudity rider is put in writing and signed. If a change is made to the rider, a 48-hour delay in production is required to avoid putting the performer on the spot with the new request, ultimately preventing them from reconsidering their boundaries on set.
In the episode, it’s clear that Jocelyn did not meet with the intimacy coordinator before the shoot.
“I have a feeling that Jocelyn’s team looked this over and spoke for her,” Liroff said, noting that this often happens in real life. “There are many times when I’ll be in a situation where I need to speak directly to the talent, and let’s say they’re very high-level talent, and I never actually get to speak specifically to that person, which is really a shame.”
While Liroff isn’t sure how she feels about the handling of “The Idol”‘s explicit content, one thing’s for sure — Depp certainly gave the creators her consent.
“People are talking about how exploited Lily-Rose Depp is, but I’ve also watched and read several interviews with her, and what is very clear to me is that she is 1,000% on board with this,” she said. “This is not some young, helpless actress that comes from middle America, shows up in Hollywood and is completely taken advantage of.”
Liroff adds that, behind-the-scenes, Depp’s feelings aren’t the only ones that were considered.
“We have a nudity rider in place not only for the performer. It’s also for the crew,” she explained. “The crew needs a head’s up on what they’re going to be experiencing that day. They need to know if they’re seeing, for instance, a very violent rape scene. A scene that is very sensitive could be triggering, not just for the performers, but for the people that are watching it from 10 different angles… It’s the crew giving their general consent to witness this.”
Liroff concluded by pointing out that “this job is very nuanced and complex. It’s very hard to explain, in one scene, what we do.
“And that scene used us as the butt of a joke, at the end of the day.”
Melissa Romualdi
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