Ciarán Hinds is opening up about the great number of sex scenes the HBO series Game of Thrones had and weighed in on intimacy coordinators on set.
The actor who played the character of Mance Rayder, the King Beyond the Wall, in the medieval fantasy epic was not a fan of the amount of sex the show featured.
“I was rather put off by the amount of sexuality that was going on in it, because it was taking away from the actual political storytelling,” he told The Independent in an interview. “But that’s business, I guess, from their perspective.”
In the same interview, Hinds also talked about intimacy coordinators on the sets of television shows that help ensure actors feel safe shooting a sex scene and facilitating dialogue with the production.
While having a conversation with his actor daughter Aoife Hinds, Hinds said, “I was asking her [about intimacy coordinators] because it seems to me strange. I didn’t come from that generation. Anything we had to create together, in scenes of a sexual nature, we just talked about it. It’s about how we tell the story together, so I didn’t understand why intimacy coordinators were suddenly everywhere.”
He continued saying, “As actors, you let your own spirits inform what you’re doing. Aoife said, ‘No, it was fantastic because your own emotional context was put on hold, and it became not quite balletic, but not your libido.”
Fellow Game of Thrones actor Sean Bean was heavily criticized when in an interview he said that intimacy coordinators “spoil the spontaneity” of sex scenes. Following Bean’s opinion, female actors like Rachel Zegler, Lena Hall, Jameela Jamil and Emma Thompson came out in support of having intimacy coordinators on set.