Ewan McGregor talks about why it was “necessary” to have intimacy coordinator on the set during sex scenes with his wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

The actor recently opened about what it was like starring alongside his wife in the TV miniseries A Gentleman in Moscow, as well as why it can be “odd” filming intimate moments in front of entire crew.

“We did have an intimacy coordinator!” McGregor said. “It’s still necessary, because it’s also about the crew, and it’s odd to be naked in front of people, it’s odd to be intimate in front of the camera. If you were doing a dance scene, you’d have a choreographer. It’s an important part of the work now, because it’s somebody that the director and actors meet in the middle.”

“My daughter is 22. If an older, famous director goes to a 22-year-old and says, ‘I want you to be naked in this scene,’ that actress might feel, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to do it, my career might depend on it.’ And then five years after that, she could look back and go, ‘I wish I hadn’t. Why am I naked in that scene? It’s unnecessary,’” McGregor said. “Now there’s somebody she talks to whose career doesn’t rest on the shoulders of this person.”

Intimacy Coordinators

McGregor isn’t the only actor in recent years to talk about the importance of intimacy coordinators on TV and movie sets.

Kate Winslet told The New York Times Magazine earlier this year that she “would have benefited from an intimacy coordinator every single time I had to do a love scene or be partially naked or even a kissing scene. It would have been nice to have had someone in my corner, because I always had to stand up for myself.”

Emma Thompson also said of intimacy coordinators “fantastically important” in 2022, adding,  “I don’t know [if] you were speaking to somebody who found it distracting, but another conversation you might find [is] that people go, ‘It made me comfortable. It made me feel safe. It made me feel as though I was able to do this work.’”