British actor Sean Bean, 63, says ‘intimacy coaches’ are ruining Hollywood sex scenes

Sean Bean has said intimacy co-ordinators ‘ruin’ Hollywood sex scenes by spoiling the spontaneity and reducing it to ‘a technical exercise’.

Intimacy coaches were introduced to protect actresses after the #MeToo campaign and have played a key role in creating sizzling sex scenes for hit dramas including Bridgerton and Normal People.

But Game of Thrones star Bean, 63, who has filmed many explicit sex scenes throughout his career, said: ‘I should imagine it slows down the thrust of it.

‘Ha, not the thrust, that’s the wrong word. It would spoil the spontaneity,’ he explained.

‘It would inhibit me more because it’s drawing attention to things – somebody saying, ‘Do this, put your hand there, while you touch his thing…’

‘I think the natural way lovers behave would be ruined by someone bringing it right down to a technical exercise.’

Bean’s most notable sex scene was with Joely Richardson in a 1993 adaptation of DH Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

He said: ‘Lady Chatterley was spontaneous. It was joy. We had a good chemistry between us, and we knew what we were doing was unusual because she was married, I was married.

‘But we were following the story. We were trying to portray the truth of what DH Lawrence wrote.’

Sex-scene coaches are mandatory at the BBC and have been praised by actresses including Daisy Edgar-Jones, who starred in the daring 2020 BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People.

Edgar-Jones has previously said having an intimacy coach was ‘brilliant’ because it was their job ‘to worry about how [the sex scenes] would work and we just turned up, did the choreography and carried on’.

But Bean said the importance of intimacy consultants ‘depends on the actress’.