"Intimacy coordinators are storytellers. I’m still a storyteller."
A conversation with Suzanne Agins. And a special invitation to support The Hometown Project
The midlife pivot is fascinating to me. We’ve all had some degree of success and now, we’re looking beyond.
— Suzanne Agins, theater director and TV and film intimacy coordinator
When I was a young actor, I was cast in a play at a regional theater, my first real Equity job. The role involved partial nudity—I spent the second half of the play in a bra and garters—and I had a make-out scene with a dude wearing a paper mâché mask. (The late, great Andy Weems; a hell of a guy!)
I was twenty years old and had never even been kissed (I know. That’s another post.) All of which to say: I was anxious, and the people in charge made me feel really bad when I requested a closed rehearsal room to choreograph the sexy stuff. Back then, actors were expected to just…deal with it. How I wish we’d have had intimacy coordinators!
So in putting together a team for Ramona at Midlife, I thought it wise to enlist my old friend Suzie, who had recently become an IC. We had no idea what to expect, but Suzie put each collaborator at ease as she helped us choreograph our intimacy scenes much the way a fight choreographer would work out the moves of a slap or punch.
Here’s a recent call we had, both about Suzie’s work in general and (drumroll, please) our next collaboration:
BB: You started as a theater director. How and when did you decide to become an intimacy coordinator for film and TV?
SA: When I was in my early twenties, I wanted to direct Shakespeare for the rest of my life. I loved telling stories on a grand scale with large casts. But when I went to graduate school, at UC San Diego. there was such a great focus on new work. I had never really been exposed to that kind of collaboration and hadn't done any new plays, and I really fell in love with that. It made me realize I’d been lonely just doing classics! Working on new plays, I discovered I loved working with a partner [the writer], collaborating on shaping the text and telling the story together.
When I left grad school, that was absolutely my focus, and I pursued new work pretty exclusively for a few years, including becoming the Artistic Associate for New Work at Williamstown Theater Festival under Roger Rees.
Cut to 2019, and I'm rehearsing a show with an enormous fight scene and two kisses, which I would characterize as “very PG.” I was talking to the fight choreographer, who told me that she was in training to be an intimacy director for theater; she asked if she could work on the kisses as practice.
Well, I grew up, like you, Brooke, in the era of "you guys go figure it out"—the director mostly abdicating responsibility for any kissing or intimacy on stage. And honestly it was something I'd always felt really uncomfortable with, telling collaborators to choreograph their own kiss scenes, so I was thrilled to have a collaborator here too.
I sat in that rehearsal, and my jaw just hit the floor. Jill, the IC, had a vocabulary and a methodology; suddenly the kisses were an integral part of the storytelling. Plus, she was so straightforward with the actors, I could see that she was building a framework that would hold any boundaries they voiced and allow them agency in the process.
Immediately I realized that I wanted those tools…as a director. I wasn't thinking at all about acquiring a new career, I just wanted to be better at the one I already had. So I signed up for an introductory workshop.
Which was scheduled for March, 2020. So that didn't happen. [Eventually,] I took a version of that workshop on Zoom. Obviously, you can't teach the embodied parts of the training on the computer, but we learned theory and language and practices. And when it was over, I felt like I still wanted to learn more. I started to think, "I'd like to do this. I think I'd be good at this."
So then I had a decision to make. The last level of training, you have to specialize in either theater or film/tv. Obviously theater has been my whole career, but it didn't feel right. I wanted to keep my artistic practice separate from this new career. So much of being an intimacy professional is about standing outside the power structure, and I didn't feel like that was really possible for me in theater. It lets me focus on what I'm there to do, because, frankly, I don't care about what lens is being used, or how anyone is lighting the scene. I don't have that expertise, so all my attention goes to the actors and the story we're telling.
So then, after a swell conversation that I won’t bore you with, Suzie and I pivoted to my current directing project, Major Minor Details, a feature I wrote and optioned years ago, before I started directing. In fact, one might say the journey towards making my own films started the day the development executive I worked with on MMD asked, “Do you want to direct this?” and I said, “Oh God, no.”
MMD is a road trip love story told out of order. My husband calls it “Before Sunrise for grownups.” And once we get funding, I would love to hire Suzie to work on the intimacy. So I asked her…
BB: In collaborating on Major Minor Details, how would we start?
SA: With the screenplay! I always start with the screenplay. I go through and note places where an Intimacy Coordinator could be helpful. SAG-AFTRA strongly encourages an IC on set whenever there's: (1) nudity, (2) simulated sex, or (3) hyperexposure, something like childbirth or a doctor's exam. Scenes with kissing or implied nudity or people walking around in underwear are kinda a gray area.
In MMD, there's the scene in which the lovers finally sleep together [spoiler], a post-coital scene, and a second scene in bed which involves some wrestling and making out—I don't know how far that goes, but it seems like I could be helpful.
You and I would have a detailed conversation about each of those scenes, and then I would speak to each actor individually about their boundaries. This would all happen long before the actual day of the shoot so that by the time we're on set, we're all super clear about what's on and off the table.
My job is to advocate for the actor, absolutely, but I'm also there to help you achieve your vision. So if you have something in mind that an actor nixes, I can help you come up with ways to tell that story within the actor's boundaries.
There are a lot of misconceptions about IC's: that we're the sex police, that we schoolmarmishly shake our fingers at naughty directors who are always trying to get away with something, but we're storytellers too. We want to be telling rich, full stories which include sex, or nudity, but without destroying the actor's psyche along the way.
Then there's the other extreme—that we magically make everyone comfortable. That's just as much a fallacy. I can't make anyone comfortable. It's an inherently weird thing to take off your clothes and kiss someone you don't know while the camera is six inches away and a guy with a boom mike is hovering over you.
But what I can do is help people be confident in their choices, be confident that no boundaries are going to be crossed, be confident that we're in a professional environment, be confident that we're telling the story the director needs to make the film work.
BB: As an IC, what department are you in?
SA: I’m a department of one! So now I’m back to the problem of loneliness.
To learn more about Suzanne Agins and her work, both as an IC and a director of new plays and musicals, visit her website. Most recently, Suzie worked on a BuzzFeed film with Leighton Meester and Tyler Posey, directed by Maureen Barocha. She teaches Drama Lab at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and is available to collaborate on your films or TV projects. I think she’s top-notch.
On another note, if you’re in the NYC area, join me for an incredible night of song to benefit The Hometown Project, October 6, 2025, at BRIC in downtown Brooklyn.
A night of protest songs and readings from passages of inspiring political speeches and monologues, featuring Ramona’s own Joel de la Fuente alongside Billy Crudup, Piper Perabo, Steven Pasquale, Michael Shannon, Okieriete “Oak” Onaodowan, Judy Kuhn, Abena Koomson-Davis, Peter Salett, Seth Herzog, and other artists and Hometown Energizers with musical accompaniment by Joe McGinty & Ray Rizzo.
You can buy tickets here.
Next week, a special feature on producer, dramaturg and all-around wonder Megan Carter, a true champion of midlife voices.
Take good care, it’s wild out there.
Love,
Brooke
This was such an interesting read.