RESEDA, Calif. — It’s 1 p.m. on a Sunday and actor Jake Holley is getting ready for his next scene. But it’s not his line delivery that has him anxious, it’s what comes next. 

“Whether you’re a very confident or a very not confident person, all the like you’re going to feel very exposed,” Holley told Spectrum News 1.

Holley plays a 16-year-old kid caught in a same sex sexual encounter that quickly goes awry in a UCLA student film called Rendezvous.

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In the past sex scenes like this one would be treated like any other. Now they are overseen by what’s called in the industry an “intimacy coordinator.” 

“I’ve got these people around me saying, 'Are you conformable, are you sure you’re comfortable?,'” Holley said. 

Since the rise of #MeToo, intimacy coordinators have gained prominence on Hollywood sets. In 2018, HBO became one of the first major networks to require intimacy coordinators for all its sexually explicit scenes. 

Amanda Blumenthal, the founder of Intimacy Professionals Association, has been one of the industry's leading intimacy coordinators. She says her job entails mediating all the intricate, and at times uncomfortable, details in each sex scene. 

“Most people don’t enjoy talking about the nitty gritty details of doing this kind of work and because of the discomfort that I think our society at large has with anything related to sex,” she said. “People would go as long as possible without actually talking about these scenes and so one of things we do as intimacy coordinators is make sure that everything is discussed all questions get answered so actors can give informed consent about what they’ll be doing.”

Last month, SAG-AFTRA, Hollywood’s biggest union, released its new guidelines on the use of intimacy coordinators. The new standards follow complaints about inappropriate handling of explicit scenes in productions.

“It has made it tremendously easier,” Holley said. “I wouldn’t have come into read if I wouldn’t have seen an intimacy coordinator in the breakdown.”