The 56-year-old intimacy coordinator has been a key figure behind sex scenes in acclaimed television series such as “I May Destroy You”, “Sex Education” and “Normal People”.
Preserving the intimacy of an artist filming a rape depiction, setting up a sex scene with a virgin actor, and identifying the limits each actor is comfortable with are all issues O’Brien is regularly confronted with.
A typical conversation she regularly has with stars, she says, goes along the lines of: “He is going to put his hand here, you put yours there and then you start the fellatio.”
She sees her role as one of ensuring “open communication” between the director and the actors on all intimate scenes that may include kissing, nudity or sex.
“This is a process by which we bring our professional structure to intimacy”, allowing the on-screen stars to “bring all of the skills of the actor to this moment,” she adds.
“We agree on a consent of touch and then a clear process by which we choreograph the intimate contact clearly. So it’s just like dance.”
Each scene will be discussed and rehearsed beforehand, away from the glare of the dozens of people usually present on a set.
“When the camera rolls or they’re up on stage, they know they can perform that intimate contact, knowing where they’re going to be touched,” she says.
At the heart of her philosophy is consent, in an industry which has been rocked in recent years by sexual assault claims. Her motto, which she says she often repeats to actors, is: “Your ‘no’ is a gift. Tell us your ‘no’, so that we can trust your ‘yes'”.
‘Incredibly hard’
O’Brien was a dancer in the theatre for 10 years and then an actress for eight before she sensed an opportunity and became an intimacy coordinator in 2014.
It was a pioneering move at a time when actors’ consent was little talked about, and before the #MeToo movement against sexual abuse and sexual harassment.
Before then, “if an actor ever said ‘no’, they’d be a troublemaker or a diva, and they would certainly be worried about losing their job,” she recalls.
In such an environment, she describes her early days in the role as “incredibly hard”.
“I’ve had productions where I’ve been told not to speak to the director,” she says. “I’m serving the director’s vision, but the director doesn’t want to speak to me because he’s a 74-year-old man, who basically doesn’t want to acknowledge my existence.”
On other occasions, she was not allowed on the set because the actors or director did not want her help.
Attitudes have since changed a lot. The profession is becoming more popular and O’Brien is in high demand, especially after Michaela Coel dedicated her best actress BAFTA win this year for “I May Destroy You” to her.
“Thank you, Ita, for making a space safe, for creating physical, emotional and professional boundaries, so we can make work about exploitation, loss of respect, about abuse of powers, without being exploited or abused in the process,” she said.