A Field Guide to Working with Intimacy Professionals

Alexis Black working with student actors on an intimate moment during the MSU Department of Theatre production of “Bonnets: How Ladies of Good Breeding Are Induced to Murder”

by Chris Peterson

I saw a TikTok recently saying directors should never serve as the intimacy professional for their own production, and honestly, yes. Absolutely yes.

I get why some directors think they can just handle it themselves. It feels efficient. It feels like one less person to schedule. It may even feel “collaborative” in that very theatre way where everyone is doing twelve jobs and calling it community.

But no.

A director and an intimacy professional are not doing the same job. The director is there to shape the production. The intimacy professional is there to help make sure the people inside that production are safe, heard, and not being pressured into something just because the person in charge wants it.

And that power dynamic is not a small thing. If a director is staging an intimate moment and also serving as the person actors are supposed to go to with concerns, that puts actors in a terrible position. They may not want to push back. They may not want to seem difficult. They may not want to risk losing trust, stage time, or future casting.

So they say yes when what they really mean is, “I’m not comfortable with this.”

This applies whether the scene is a full makeout, a romantic touch, a kiss, or even something that looks simple on paper. Especially in community theatre, student films, small productions, and unpaid work, these systems should not disappear. Those are often the rooms where actors have the least power and the fewest protections.

And no, being a “safe person” is not the same thing as being trained.

You can be kind. You can be supportive. You can have good intentions. Great. Still not the same as knowing consent-based staging, trauma-informed practice, boundary language, documentation, and how to step in when something is not working.

Theatre already asks people to be vulnerable in strange ways. We ask actors to cry, rage, kiss, collapse, confess, and sometimes expose parts of themselves physically and emotionally in front of strangers. The least the room can do is not wing it.

A good intimacy professional does not get in the way of the work. They usually make the work better. When actors know they can trust the process, they can actually do the scene instead of spending half their brain wondering if they are allowed to say no.

They also protect directors. Even good directors have blind spots. Even careful directors can misread a situation. Having a trained third party in the room can prevent harm before it becomes a story people are still talking about years later.

So hire the intimacy professional. Respect the process. Let someone trained for the job do the job.