Rivals sex scenes required 'trust' and 'open conversations', cast reveal
Aidan Turner and his co-stars tell Yahoo UK why intimacy coordinators made the Disney+ show 'better'
Watch: Rivals cast discusses sex scenes and intimacy coordinators
A show like Rivals requires its cast to be comfortable in all sorts of situations but mainly sex scenes, because in the spirit of Jilly Cooper's original work the Disney+ series is as racy as they come — luckily they did thanks to a team of intimacy coordinators working on the project, the cast tell Yahoo UK.
The show follows the rivalry between showjumper-turned-politician, and shameless lothario, Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) and TV executive Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), who hires Irish journalist Declan O'Hara (Aidan Turner) to be the new face of his TV station. When Declan, his wife Maud (Victoria Smurfit), and daughters Taggie (Bella Maclean) and Caitlin (Catriona Chandler) move to the fictional Rutshire they are thrust into the decadent lifestyle of England's elite.
It's a world where everyone is horny and no one is faithful, creating a fun, campy drama that will delight audiences as much as surprise the fans. As a result, Turner, Hassell, Tennant and co-stars like Danny Dyer, Katherine Parkinson, Emily Atack, and Nafessa Williams have their fair share of sex scenes onscreen which required a lot of trust and "open conversations" on their part with their scene partners.
Turner joked with Yahoo UK that there weren't "some" intimacy coordinators but "many" involved in the series: "I think we all just got into it, got involved, you sort of have to with these things. I find it just makes things a lot easier and better, quicker, I think you get better work and the dialogue is better, more creative. It's just adding somebody in who's an expert of this thing.
"I think you can have more fun with it when you have intimacy coordinators involved, I've found. It's just one of those things that works for the show and a lot of these scenes are fun so they require a different element of acting in that way. But yeah, it was a lot of fun really."
Turner's on-screen wife Smurfit agrees, saying he was "divine" to work with on set because they had an understanding of their characters relationship and how to convey it onscreen.
"It's not just about, I guess, protecting the actor on set," Smurfit remarks. "It's also about having ideas and and bringing in the actor with what the camera needs. But bottom line, you're working with people you trust implicitly from the top down, so I'm a wide open book, let's tell the story in the best way we possibly can.
"Aidan is so divine, sometimes you work with actors where you don't even need to discuss things, you just know where you're going to go with the passionate range of their marriage, with the darkness of their marriage, with the pain, the joy, the sex, all of that. So it was extremely easy because we knew we were telling a story, and sometimes you had clothes on, sometimes it didn't."
Rivals showrunner Dominic Treadwell-Collins has said there's equal amounts of nudity from the men and women, and this is certainly true when it comes to Hassell whose character's rakish personality means he's rarely seen with clothes on — which is something the actor had to accept.
"We had very open conversations on sort of all levels about what we were comfortable with, it's always quite a weird thing to do," Hassell tells Yahoo UK. "Knowing that I had so much to do, I kind of tried to make a decision to be as relaxed about it as possible and to really focus on making sure that everyone else was very comfortable and that we all knew each other's boundaries and had plotted it all in a way that told the story in the best possible way.
"And [that it] was fun where it should be fun, and less fun when it should be more serious but was always an extension of the characters and the relationships and the dynamics. I think it's important to tell those aspects of people's lives on TV as long as it's done respectfully, there's nothing gratuitous in it to my mind. It's a fun, important, interesting, and revealing part of the story."
Dyer, who plays new money tech businessman Freddie Jones, remembers a time when there were no intimacy coordinators on a set, and argues that things have improved since productions began bringing them on board.
"I was around when there was no intimacy coach, or anything like that," he says. "It is an odd part of what we do but it's an important part of what we do and it happens a lot, and so you gotta trust each other and get on with it. But I think that now we've got this new, added third party it just relaxes everything a little bit and they were really good."
He shares scenes of this nature with Parkinson as Freddie finds connection with her character, writer Lizzie Vereker, because she, like him, is married to someone who doesn't appreciate her. The IT Crowd actor shared how she also saw the benefit of having intimacy coordinators on set, saying they were "really helpful" with their advice on how to make their scenes not be over-the-top.
Read more: Rivals is lauded as 'gloriously trashy' and 'riotously OTT' by critics
"The intimacy coordinators can really help with things like breath and how to act, because it's very easy to act sex very badly," Parkinson says. "I remember the very helpful advice from her was making it about breath rather than noises... she told me to stop mooing!"
Feeling safe on set
Joking around aside, there were some scenes that asked a lot of the cast such as a scene featuring full frontal nudity from Hassell and Emily Atack when Rupert and his paramour Sarah Stratton are enjoying a game of naked tennis and get caught out by Taggie. Yes, really.
"During a scene like that, of course, it's absolutely terrifying," Atack shares with Yahoo UK. "What I always say about these kinds of scenes they're always very integral to the story. It's done, I think, very tastefully. It's not just people getting their kit off for no reason.
"I was quite excited about it, weirdly, like, excited scared, and then as soon as I met Alex I was just so comfortable with Alex, so comfortable on the set, we all bonded really, really quickly. It was a closed set, everyone was very respectful and we had intimacy coordinators, I had a very good spray tan, and then we were good to go."
"It was actually really liberating and by the end you couldn't get my clothes back on," Atack jokes.
The notion of relationships with imbalances of power are a recurring theme in the series, including with characters like Williams' TV producer Cameron Cook and Tennant's Tony. That power imbalance does lead to some dark places too, though, particularly when Tony doesn't take kindly to Cameron showing an interest in other people — despite him being married to someone else.
There are some interactions that will be difficult for viewers to watch but Williams shares that she always "felt very protected" when filming sex scenes: "They weren't anything that were for me to be afraid of or to shy away from, I loved that Cameron had a powerfulness in how she approached her sexuality. So I was here for it, it was a good time for me."
"It was a blast being alongside David," she goes on. "I was studying him a lot too, he's so good at what he does. But it was fun, and [Tony] scares a lot of people but he doesn't scare Cameron as much as he gets to everybody else. She has a great level of respect and love and adoration for him, so it was just a really good time being opposite of him."
Even so, Williams enjoyed playing a character like Cameron: "It was just really fun, liberating too, [to play] a woman in a white man's 80s world —which is a very different world than what we know today— just going in and owning her sexuality, and being confident within it... I took a lot away from Cameron, I was like, 'am I as confident as Cameron?' I walked away 'OK, Cameron you taught me something'."
Another relationship that embodies this power imbalance is the budding romance between Taggie and Rupert, not least because of the twenty year age gap between them. Taggie finds the man as arrogant as she does alluring and they share a push-pull dynamic that is at the heart of the whole story.
Maclean explains that she and Hassell "got along so well" that it was easy to create that bond between Taggie and Rupert on-screen: "I remember when we were doing our chemistry read and there was an immediate rapport, that was the same throughout the series.
"Alex has such a good sense of humour and had me constantly corpsing on set, and he's such a fantastic actor so it was really easy to just work off of him and we developed a fantastic friendship, so we were able to work really well together."
Making the unlikeable likeable
It's their relationship that makes Rupert's deep-seated loneliness more apparent too, which is something Hassell was keen to get across especially when he seems so self-absorbed and narcissistic most of the time: "That was really important to us all, I think, in terms of making this character as multifaceted as possible, and as three-dimensional as possible.
"He's like a Gothic antihero rattling around his big empty mansion by himself, having to live with the mistakes he's made and the people he's broken relationships with. It was really wonderful to get to play such a gamut of different relationships and different scenes... it was really fun to get to play those other sides of him."
For the most part Rupert is not a likeable character, nor are many of the other people in the narrative, but that's exactly why it is perfect, according to Dyer: "There isn't many likeable people in this show in a good way, like Succession, although I think it's better than Succession. [Rivals] p****s all over it actually, that's my quote." High praise, indeed.
Rivals is out now on Disney+.