At her Monday Screen Talk at the 70th BFI London Film Festival, Cynthia Erivo said, "I think not enough credit is given to intimacy coordinators. They're often given a hard time for the work that they have to do on the set," The Hollywood Reporter reports.
She went on: "But the work that they do is really important, and it isn't just about choreographing a scene, a sex scene, a love scene, romantic scene — it's about sometimes having to not just choreograph these really hard, harrowing scenes but also making sure that everybody comes back to their bodies safely."
Erivo was talking about her new film, Prima Facie, in which she plays a lawyer who becomes a rape victim. She singled out the film's intimacy coordinator, Lizzy Talbot. "Lizzy, our intimacy coordinator, was really helpful with creating a space that felt very safe," Erivo said, per Reality Tea.
She also praised co-star Daniel Ings, who "from the beginning, was very, very kind and immediately wanted to have a conversation about how we could be protective of one another and how we could be helpful in those places, at those moments, so that we could go as far as we needed to go, and then come back again," Erivo said.
In an earlier Hollywood Reporter interview published ahead of the film's Toronto International Film Festival premiere, Erivo said she "flanked myself with a really good intimacy coordinator and a really good therapist — and made sure that I tapped them whenever I needed to."
She described working with Talbot on specifics. "It really was about where my limit was, how far it goes — and if we get lost, how to get back into the room," Erivo said. "There were moments where we would slip, where it would go too far for me," she said. "I would go too far and it would be hard to come back — there were moments of having little panic attacks, where I'd get way too emotional. But Lizzy was right there."
Erivo also said she hopes the film sparks a bigger conversation about consent and about "preconceived notions about how Black women particularly experience pain." "Consent is sometimes hard for all of us to comprehend," she said, per The Hollywood Reporter. "That it's a big complex thing that is more to do with the way we receive 'no' than the way we see a 'yes.'"
Prima Facie adapts Suzie Miller's play of the same name. Susanna White directs, and Ings and Harry Treadaway also star.