Movie fans have been eagerly awaiting Kristen Stewart's new romantic thriller Love Lies Bleeding to drop on the 2024 movie release schedule (it hits theaters March 8) ever since it earned rave reviews at Sundance earlier this year. Early-bird viewers praised the star's potent, electric chemistry with her co-star Katy O'Brian, and Stewart recently revealed that their onscreen connection was boosted by the presence of an intimacy coordinator.
The 33-year-old actress plays a reclusive gym manager Lou, who falls hard for Jackie (O'Brian), an ambitious bodybuilder with dreams of making it big in Las Vegas. Things quickly heat up between the characters—as seen in Love Lies Bleeding's steamy, tense trailer—though their relationship is complicated by Lou's criminal family (led by a terrifying Ed Harris). In portraying the bond between Lou and Jackie, Stewart told Yahoo Entertainment that the movie's intimacy coordinator helped make filming those physical scenes feel "free":
It felt free. I know people are like, 'Oh, it just hinders what you can do' and didn't. No, I was into it. It's almost like having a nice open conversation about like what you all want and then, so you can have really good sex.
An intimacy coordinator is a member of a film crew who acts as a liaison between the actors and the rest of production, most often during the filming of sex scenes. This staffer works closely with directors, movement coaches and choreographers to help map out how simulated sex, instances of nudity and other intimate scenes will play out both onscreen and during filming.
The Oscar-nominated star—known for her performances in Spencer, Clouds of Sils Maria, Still Alice, Happiest Season and the Twilight franchise, among others—noted that that "freeing" feeling she had on Love Lies Bleeding wasn't always the case when she's filmed intimate scenes in the past:
I've always just been sort of thrown into [sex scenes]. Every scene usually is just — they begin kissing, maybe someone says something, they fall down, they begin to make love. And then you're like, cool so it's just a free-for-all, huh? Like, no one knows where anything's going? We didn't do it like that at all. There's a precision to the scene, there's a real power play dynamic thing happening, and so in order for that to really land and not us just being self-conscious face-smushers, it was directed pretty finitely.
The actress, who came out publicly while hosting Saturday Night Live back in 2017 and has become a queer icon in the years since, also praised the upcoming A24 film for its refreshing depiction of queer people in the 1980s-set story:
In the '80s, there was an audaciousness and like a sort of lack of fear. I don't know, not lack of fear, just sort of an intensity that we've lost a bit. Like our edges have been dulled a bit in trying to be more considerate and nice to each other—which I am all about. But also we are monsters because we're humans. It's important to not make movies about, especially queer people, that are strictly just sort of just teaching lessons and trying to be good all around, moral compass people. So I was like this is good, this is fun.
You can see exactly how well Kristen Stewart's intimacy coordinator did in fostering that freedom between Lou and Jackie when Love Lies Bleeding hits theaters on March 8.
