Hollywood actress Emma Stone has praised the on-set intimacy coordinator after filming for racy 2023 flick Poor Things, which saw her play a young woman adjusting to her sexuality
Emma Stone once questioned Poor Things intimacy coordinator’s on-set presence before filming steamy scenes.
Back in August 2023, Stone said: “I couldn’t have been more wrong. She was so gentle and passionate. She was so helpful, it changed the entire energy of the set and the feeling of safety.”
33-year-old Elle McAlpine worked on the film and helped Emma navigate the trickier scenes, which left viewers totally gobsmacked. One such moment was when Emma’s character, Bella Baxter, was working as a prostitute and two boys began to watch her.
Elle explained that having the children around during such an intimate moment made filming “quite difficult” and she had to brief their parents on what was about to happen. She need not have worried – the mother responded: “Oh, he watched Game of Thrones all the time, so that’s fine!”
McAlpine also appeared on the Directors Note podcast and addressed her relationship with Emma throughout the filming process: “I remember saying to [Emma], your character is having a lot of intimate relations with men that she doesn’t know and by default, there are a lot of supporting artists coming in. My work can be to help them because they are also coming into a space where there is a huge power dynamic situation going on, where you’ve got a very famous actor and a very famous director […]”
The industry professional continued on to say that the supporting actors can feel “a huge level of pressure coming into a room” full of well known faces. In this case, Elle gets to work and “gives them space where they can feel safe”.
The intimacy coordinator co-founded her business EK Intimacy back in 2022 and has worked on many shows, including It’s A Sin and The Great. She founded the company after her own experience filming sex scenes.
She told Daily Mail: “I remember filming a sex scene when I was 21 which wasn’t choreographed and all the crew were male, so I had to drag a make-up artist on set for moral support.”