In this season’s premiere of HBO’s The Deuce, the actress Emily Meade, who plays Lori, a prostitute turned rising porn star, is seen half naked and chained to a water pipe along the ceiling of a movie set. She should look scared, says the director; no lines are required of her, the wide-eyed look will sell it. She spreads her legs apart, and readies herself for her scene partners—a dildo and the leathered man holding the dildo—until the heavy chains come loose and pistol-whip her in the right eye. The director, the sound guy, her pimp—no one pays much attention when she cries out for help.
On the surface, it looks like just another day for Lori, who experiences misogyny on the streets, and much too much of it in season one, and misogyny on set, a fact that remains an ongoing theme. In truth, season one and season two, at least for Meade and Maggie Gyllenhaal and the other cast members who engage in sex scene after sex scene in The Deuce, are worlds away from each other, thanks in part to one person not pictured on camera: Alicia Rodis, an actress, stunt performer, and full-time intimacy coordinator who, in the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp, has found herself very in demand as of late.
“As a stunt performer, I have a liaison all the time, someone asking me if I am okay with a 15-foot-high fall changing to an 18-foot-high fall,” says Rodin. “But as a day player, where there is nudity and simulated sex? Nothing. If actors aren’t responsible for their own fight scenes, why should they be responsible for engaging in sex?”
It’s a good question—especially when the risk behind a free fall and being vulnerable and nude on camera is, for many, emotionally equal. Meade says she found herself pondering it last year, before the production of season two would begin, when news of sexual misconduct surrounding her costar James Franco surfaced.
“I realized I wasn’t okay,” Meade says over coffee in Tribeca. “Playing a prostitute, then porn star, with little preparation every week, which is the nature of TV, was very anxiety-provoking for me. I wanted somebody whose job was only to protect us in the sex scenes, because there are so many factors when it comes to working with people who are your friends or your bosses; you don’t want to disappoint anybody.”
Meade is about 10 minutes late, 15 if you count my five, and she is wearing jeans and a vintage T-shirt that is faded and cropped at the midriff. Wide-eyed and makeup-free, she possesses an innate pinup beauty: Her bedhead is dyed a honey blonde, the arches of her brows sit high and long, and her lips form a natural pout. It’s this natural-born sensuality that has impacted her castings since her first job. At 16, her first foray into acting called for parental consent, since the role required nudity. She’d go on to act in dozens of projects, all of which, she says, would find some reason for nudity—including network TV pilots, where it’s illegal to show nudity.
“I remember one director saying to me once, ‘There is just something about you that is so sweet and beautiful you just want to see bad things happen to you,’ ” she says, shaking her head. “I think it’s a mixture of things,” she continues, her left arm now rubbing her right shoulder, as if she was giving herself a hug. “I’ve had a lot of complex experiences with sex, so maybe that’s on me, maybe they can smell it on me.”
For better or worse, it’s something she leaned into at work—although she’d only do nudity twice before The Deuce. “I’m good at shutting off,” she says of the defense mechanisms she developed while on set, like rarely looking her costars in the eyes when naked, a lack of intimacy she regrettably carried into her personal life. “There was an athlete quality to my attitude, ‘Of course I’m okay.’ But I realized I didn’t want to shut down anymore, I wanted to be present, but in a safe way.”
“What we’re learning through the #MeToo movement, is that intent and impact are two very different things,” says Rodis, who spent her formative years in dance, martial arts, and “playing the slutty best friend” before turning to more physical work, like stage combat. She and other movement artists would go on to start Intimacy Directors International, a foundation that advocates and creates protocols for actors engaging in simulated sex, both physically and mentally—something that has never been, quite shockingly, put in place until now. “Anyone can have the best of intentions, but if there isn’t an unbiased party present, someone who isn’t in a position of power, the impact can be very negative.”
Through help from social workers, psychiatrists, and experts who specialize in post traumatic stress syndrome, Rodis and her organization do everything possible to create an environment of “informed consent.” And not just for actors like Meade, but for the director and the sound guy, too. “It’s not just the victim but also the aggressor and the witness that experience trauma,” she says. “I’ve had costume people come up to me and say, ‘You have no idea the things I’ve seen.’ ”
That’s why, when Rodis got the call from HBO, thanks to Meade raising her hand to creators David Simon and George Pelecanos, she wasn’t surprised in the least—and got straight to set, making sure everyone was comfortable pre-, post-, and during production on season two. And just two days ago, HBO announced they will have intimacy coordinators on set to monitor all shows containing explicitly sexual content.
Depending on the person, and the role, it could mean a simple conversation around personal hygiene, from clean hands to good breath to body-hair maintenance, especially if the scene calls for an adhesive and barrier between costars. If the scene includes difficult choreography, Rodis makes sure they are seamless. Another part of her work happens long before call time, something she calls “emotional fitness.” “Just like how there are certain times in life that you may be more physically fit, we feel the same way about emotional and mental fitness. So if an actor is going through a tough scene in the next few weeks, we’ll talk about how to get in a positive mental space.” That could mean therapy, yoga, meditation—“whatever allows them to be present with themselves so they can be present with others.”
For Meade, and her own limitations, preproduction on The Deuce meant a lot of small movement exercises, such as eye-to-eye contact and consensual hand touching, where one person takes the other person’s hand and places it where it will be in the scene. “It was almost like a middle school slumber party, where we had to go downstairs and look at each other in the eyes, and chew gum, and talk about chewing gum, and give each other permission to touch each other,” says Meade of her scene partner in episode three, when Lori travels to Los Angeles sans her pimp C.C., and meets a guy she actually likes. “I was acting like a 12-year-old boy, cracking jokes, wondering what I had done asking for this intimacy coordinator, until I realized my scene partner was calmed down by the exercise. It turned out to be the easiest, most comfortable sex scene I did,” says Meade. “I wish Alicia would come on all my dates.”
The next episode of The Deuce, entitled “Nobody Has to Get Hurt,” airs on HBO on Sunday, October 28 at 9:00 p.m.
