As we anticipate the third season of House of the Dragon (likely coming in 2026), the HBO series’ star Olivia Cooke has taken a break from Alicent Hightower and the Game of Thrones franchise to star in Amazon Prime’s The Girlfriend. The series on the 2025 TV schedule that just released in full sparked Cooke to talk about what filming sex scenes and why she’s pro-intimacy coordinators.
The prominence of Intimacy coordinators on movie and TV sets started in reaction to the #MeToo Movement around 2018, and has been an ongoing topic among Hollywood filmmakers and talent ever since. From Cooke’s perspective, sex scenes can place actors in “really precarious and vulnerable situations”, and it might be difficult for young women in particular to speak up in fear one might be labelled as “difficult” or “a bitch.”
As Cooke also told iNews, when there’s a good intimacy coordinator around, they can “sense hesitation and become your voice” during the filming of sex scenes. The House of The Dragon actress shared that she believes “showing intimacy, passion is an integral part of reflecting the human experience” but she thinks it should be able to be accomplished without actors feeling like “a chunk of yourself has been taken”. As Olivia Cooke also added on the topic:
It’s amazing to me that people had to just fudge their way through those scenes before those people existed.
HBO was reportedly one of the first networks to implement intimacy coordinators on their sets, making Olivia Cooke’s work with intimacy coordinators the norm – especially on the rather sexually explicit nature of House Of The Dragon. When the Game of Thrones spinoff’s intimacy coordinator Miriam Lucia spoke with Deadline about the process back in 2022, said she was invited to be part of the show starting during the rehearsal process. She said her job is to “ensure that there’s a safe environment”, and would aid in the discussion of how sex scenes were approached.
Olivia Cooke’s new series is a psychological thriller about the tensions that build between her character and her boyfriend’s mother, who questions her motivations with her son after they start dating. In the same interview, Cooke said she’s a “very guilt-ridden person” who’s “full of shame from childhood Sunday school,” but playing what she calls “morally wonky” characters is actually rather fun for her. As she shared:
It’s delicious… It’s so freeing for me to slip into the skin of a woman who’s ruled by her impulses and does not give a shit.
Thanks to Cooke’s positive experiences with intimacy coordinators she’s continued to feel comfortable enough to play characters who aren’t held back by moments of intimacy. Now, if some House of the Dragon fans could stop with the “hate-filled things ” she recently said the cast have encountered.
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