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“Widow’s Bay.” “Your Friends & Neighbors.” “Bridgerton.” “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.” “The Beast in Me.” “The Diplomat.” These six series have more in common than their 2026 Emmy nominations. They also share the same intimacy coordinator — Lizzy Talbot. The British former stunt coordinator has been at the forefront of intimacy coordinators becoming an industry norm for more than a decade now.
According to Talbot, intimacy coordinators have three jobs: to advocate, to coordinate and to choreograph. Advocacy includes crafting nudity riders, establishing boundaries and ensuring closed sets when necessary. Coordinating sees Talbot working with any department involved in an intimacy scene to make sure everyone is on the same page when it comes time to film. Choreographing nails down the exact places actors will touch and what the camera will see during nude and vulnerable moments.
“A lot of times we are characterized as the sex police, but we love doing intimate work,” Talbot said. “Part of this job is reading the room and being a people person. It’s an interpersonal job. This is what’s really fun for us.”
The three aspects of the job mean every time Talbot is on set looks different. Choreographing a sea witch straddling a man’s face until he suffocates (“Widow’s Bay”) is different from dramatizing the intimate moments of the 1990s’ most recognized celebrity couple (“Love Story”), and both of those differ from creating the physical storytelling for almost every lead character across multiple sex scenes (“Your Friends & Neighbors”).
“Love Story” required Talbot’s presence throughout the whole season, primarily working with leads Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly to create the physical language that made them the most comfortable and looked the best onscreen across multiple scenes together.
“It starts with conversations with the actors at the beginning. What are they looking for? What are they hoping to achieve? What’s really standing out to them about this particular story? It’s giving them an avenue to talk about something if they need to and making sure they are set in choreography and they know what’s going to happen on the day,” Talbot said of her process. “We’re being really careful because, obviously, this is about two real people.”
It’s becoming an industry norm to have an intimacy coordinator when there’s nudity or simulated sex, but Talbot is available for any scene where actors want help establishing boundaries. So it may surprise some that Talbot’s favorite scene from “Love Story” involves both Kelly and Pidgeon fully clothed.
“There’s a really beautiful scene that we did where they’ve got the karaoke machine. They’re just dancing in this cafe, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful moment,” Talbot recalled. “Everyone was in love with it because it was stunning. These actors have such a beautiful, natural chemistry, and the story is shining through.”
“Your Friends & Neighbors” has more complicated dynamics.
“There’s loads of different types of intimacy going on,” Talbot said. “But the undercurrent is always money and power.”
By featuring characters (and actors) in their 40s and 50s, “Your Friends & Neighbors” also creates space to explore facets of intimacy rarely seen on TV: Amanda Peet’s character, Mel, is in the early stages of menopause in Season 2, and her character grapples with what that means for her sex life. It’s an adjustment to need to carry lube around in your purse, but it’s not a discussion we see often.
“I loved working on the Amanda Peet menopause scene,” Talbot said. “It’s just so important to have that reflected onscreen for so many different women because it’s something that we just don’t see. She’s an incredibly fun person to work with, and she throws herself into this stuff.”
Tone was most essential when working on “Widow’s Bay’s” third episode, “The Inaugural Swim,” in which a sea hag (Carryl Lynn) tracks Mayor Loftis (Matthew Rhys) back to his home and attempts to suffocate him between her legs in his own recliner. Yes, the scene is intimate, but the nature of the show requires it to also be horrifying and comedic.
Lynn and her stunt double are also covered in prosthetics as she climbs up the recliner, and Rhys uses the side lever to launch her off his torso. The active stunt puts the emphasis heavily on the coordinator part of Talbot’s title.
“They’re sitting in the chair for hours and hours, so we’re making sure that our choreography isn’t messing with something that takes so long to create,” she explained. “It’s figuring out how this person is going to fly off this chair. We’ve got our stunt coordinator there to make sure that’s done safely, so I can focus on, tonally, how we make this bizarre, amazing scene happen.”
Having worked on Ryan Murphy productions such as “American Horror Story” and “The Beauty,” Talbot has come to expect the unexpected. “Working on these types of shows, you just have to prepare yourself for a lot more goo than you’re usually used to dealing with in sex scenes,” she advised. And that feels like a good note for everyone.
