Outlander teaser: "I Am Not Alone" – Season Finale
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Season seven of Outlander won’t be hitting screens for some time with the series currently filming. While fans wait for the Droughtlander to end, many are curious to know more about what goes into making the epic historical Starz drama. Intimacy coordinator Coffey started working on the show on the sixth outing and is now contributing to the forthcoming seventh run.
Originally, from Sydney, Australia with a background in corporate law, Coffey moved to Glasgow to retrain as an actor and a dancer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. After completing her training, Coffey served as a lecturer at her alma mater.
She said her job on Outlander and going into intimacy coordination were “linked in a way” with graduates seeking her out for advice.
Coffey explained: “A number of ex-students started to come back in, ‘I know you’ve got a law degree, would you mind having a look at my nudity clause in this contract as I’d like to be able to negotiate it? Would you be able to negotiate it with me?’
“Then it would progress to me having a conversation with either the director or they would ask me to do something else.
“One in particular asked me to go on set with her to make sure people stayed with the nudity writer that we’d agree.
“Then on another show, someone else who had found out I’d done that piece of work with that individual said, ‘Can you come on this show with me? Because I need you to help me choreograph something”, because they know about my movement work.”
She went on to say: “As those things started to really build, I started realising there wasn’t anybody who was doing that work. It was a job that I was seeing though.”
Coffey said she then came across Alicia Rodis, who was named as an intimacy coordinator on HBO’s The Deuce, and realised she was doing something similar albeit informally at the time.
She explained: “This is a job and I’ve been doing it as a friend essentially for people. And then Sam Heughan came back into the Conservatoire to do a talk and knew what I was doing with the students and said, ‘We need somebody like you on our show.’
“So that’s how the Outlander side of things really started and it’s a show, as we know, has a lot of intimacy.
“It’s been fantastic as an intimacy coordinator to have an opportunity to work on that because there’s a lot of material that’s often very varied material.”
Coffey added: “I was absolutely delighted to be able to go on there and to work with people who’d studied at the same place that I did and there are so many of them.”
Heughan has previously said how he wanted to bring on board an intimacy coordinator not only to support and protect the cast, but particularly to help newcomers to the acting industry.
He admitted when he started working in the industry, intimacy coordination didn’t exist and he had to learn from experience after being “thrown in the deep end”.
Intimacy coordination has grown hugely over the past few years with many productions bringing someone on board to helm the more sensitive scenes – not only on screen but also in theatre.
With the recent rapid cultural shifts and working practices within the entertainment field, brought about in a large part to the #MeToo era, there has been a sea change in the way sex scenes, nudity and intimate moments are now handled.
Coffey’s work starts with the scripts and ends with the filming of the scenes with a rigorous process in between involving many discussions with the cast and the crew before progressing to choreographing and rehearsing these sequences.
Her work has been praised by the producers and lead stars Heughan and Caitriona Balfe, who have found her involvement to be extremely beneficial to the filming process.
They also told her having an intimacy coordinator on set allowed them to have conversations which were previously only had in the context of a stunt or a fight.
She is now back in Scotland working on season seven after recently finishing a job on season two of Netflix drama Vikings: Valhalla. Coffey said: “It’s great to be working with them again.”
Outlander season 7 is in production and season 6 is available to watch on STARZPLAY now
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