NormalPeople managed to do the seemingly impossible: convey good sex as it actually happens in real life, not good sex as it happens onscreen
Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones as Connell and Marianne. Photo: Enda Bowe/Hulu There’s a sex scene in the second episode of Normal People that lasts nine minutes and 24 seconds — or, put another way, a third of the entire episode. It begins with Marianne , our endearingly awkward heroine, haphazardly applying eyeliner, then wiping it off in frustration before pulling on a blazer and walking nervously over to Connell’s house.
A lot of that can be credited to Ita O’Brien, the show’s intimacy coordinator, who worked with Edgar-Jones, Mescal, and directors Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald to create a space where the actors could feel comfortable while having fake sex in front of a crew and, eventually, an audience of millions.
Abrahamson in particular knew exactly how he wanted the scenes to look and feel. He showed O’Brien the photographs of Nan Goldin as a sort of mood board, explaining that he wanted the scenes to feel “unglamorous, just natural and normal, with open nakedness.” He meant that both literally and figuratively: As Mescal puts it, Abrahamson “didn’t want them to feel different from a dialogue scene.” And then, of course, he wanted actual nudity, too, to make their relationship feel authentic.
Before shooting that first scene, and every sex scene thereafter, O’Brien and the actors would plan out the movements beat by beat, fully clothed, leaving just a little bit of room for improvisation. “By the end of that they’re already going, ‘Oh, phew, I know how it’s going to be done.’ It takes away the fear around it. It makes it professional,” says O’Brien.
Rarely did a sex scene go by without at least one of the two actors dissolving into laughter. “Ita let us let off the steam that we needed to by having a giggle, because it is a bit hysterical sometimes,” says Edgar-Jones. “I would just love for people to see the outtakes,” adds Mescal. “We’re in the throes of passion and our faces are about a millimeter apart, and then a note comes in, and we both immediately kick out of character.
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