Game Of Thrones actor Ciarán Hinds throws his opinion into the sex scene discourse
Ciarán Hinds weighed in on the discourse, saying he was "put off" by the show's sexuality
Aux News Ciarán Hinds
Penn Badgley is a real Hollywood trendsetter. No, it’s not because of his luscious locks or silly little Tik Tok dances (although these are oft-imitated). What the actor is (unfortunately) perhaps best known for right now are his opinions on sex scenes—or, more specifically, his lack of desire to perform in them—which has ignited one of the more contentious Discourses Of The Month, at least since nepo babies.
The latest actor who no one asked to weigh in on this but felt the need to anyway is Game Of Thrones’ Ciarán Hinds, who played King-Beyond-The-Wall Mance Rayder in seasons three through five. Remember that man who was always wrapped in like eight layers of fur, none of which he ever took off, much less in an intimate setting? Yeah, him.
“I was rather put off by the amount of sexuality that was going on in [GOT], because it was taking away from the actual political storytelling,” Hinds recently told The Independent. “But that’s business, I guess, from their perspective.”
Hinds, of course, has a fair point here. GOT was after all the show that initially inspired the term “sexposition” (using sexual acts in the background to liven up a scene with a lot of talking) something it has been summarily critiqued for. Sophie Turner has been candid about the rape scenes she had to film (something House Of The Dragon walked back, fortunately) and did not hire an intimacy coordinator to make any of these scenes safer.
Despite all this, Hinds—like fellow GOT-star Sean Bean—finds the whole concept of intimacy coordinators “strange.” (Note: neither man had to film a single sex scene on the show, nor was ever made to be nude like their female counterparts.)
“I was asking [my daughter] because it seems to me strange,” Hinds said. His daughter, Aoife Hinds, worked closely with an intimacy coordinator on the set of Normal People, where she played opposite Paul Mescal.
“I didn’t come from that generation,” he continued. “Anything we had to create together, in scenes of a sexual nature, we just talked about it. It’s about how we tell the story together, so I didn’t understand why intimacy coordinators were suddenly everywhere. As actors, you let your own spirits inform what you’re doing. Aoife said, ‘No, it was fantastic because your own emotional context was put on hold, and it became not quite balletic, but not your libido.’”
This skepticism is almost certainly a generational thing, at least in the opinion of House Of The Dragon’s intimacy coordinator, Miriam Lucia. She also doesn’t agree with perspectives like Hinds’ that her role gets in the way of an actor’s freedom. “I think it helps to enable the creative process, because I think once you’ve worked out what the actors are comfortable with in terms of touch and consent, and what the movements are going to be, then you add the emotion to it,” she said in a recent interview. “And then you find the freedom, because you’re not scrambling and fumbling and trying to find it there and then in the moment.”
44 Comments
What are his feelings about coffee cups left in scenes?
Ugggghhh I know that this comment appears on every article that the AV Club posts nowadays but like: why are you being snarky about this?You guys always do this thing where you create a context into which you place peoples’ words that makes it easier for you to be vaguely dismissive or even hostile towards them.On this occasion you’re doing the whole “this fuckin guy didn’t have any sex scenes bit he’s got opinions anyway” schtick as if you didn’t make a conscious, aciaffirmative, decision to publish an article about little more than a man having a thought.And then you’re doing the whole “look at this aging dinosaur who doesn’t understand intimacy co-ordinators, despite his own reservations about the sexual content” bit, but like: he fuckin’ talked to his daughter about it. He’s thoughtful about it. He doesn’t understand it but he’s clearly trying and he accepts it either way. Its an article in which a man shares a thought on something with someone, and it’s a wholly unremarkable thought at that, and then you guys create an article about it in which you go “pffffft check out this idiot’s thought”.Don’t you think that’s weird?
One thing I can’t stand is when people try extra hard to make people sound arrogant just for giving an opinion. “Oooooh, Mr. Famous Person think us plebes need him to tell us what to think.” It’s like when people say someone is “lecturing.”
Right? It gets really weird really quickly too, because it’s like “an entertainment publication exactly like this one, asked the famous person for an answer to a specific question, and now we are going to frame that answer as though it was just unprompted vitriol”.Interviewer: what do you think of cats?Subject: More of a dog person reallyAV Club: “famous person is off on another anti-cat screed”It’s like there’s been a conflation between famous people having those restaurant tantrums where they belittle the service staff, and famous people obligingly saying things in response to the questions put to them.
These days this site is pretty much fueled by either (a) snideness, (b) smugness (c) self-righteousness or (d) some kind of combination thereof.
It’s super depressing. I’ve been coming here daily for like 20 years and this site used to be sooooo good. It felt like a genuinely quirky and intelligent labour of love, and now it’s like 90% clickbait through a bad faith, hyper-judgemental, snark filter. I guess it’s a reflection of the times but there must surely be a gap in the market for what this site used to be.
Snug-righteousness.
That sounds more like a marketing slogan for an eco-friendly quilt.
At this point , having a sarky ‘opinion’ on something rather than just reporting it is all they do here. I’m not knocking the writers it’s basically the style they’re made use …as it’s more likely to generate comments ( yes , like these), which is ‘engagement’ which is what management want as its more likely to generate ad revenue. I mean I only come here as there isn’t anything better ( and to be fair the writing is still pretty good mostly) but it’s the state of Internet journalism these days..
It’s due to AVC having had a specific house style, back when they had a good amount of writers who *crafted* that style.Now you’ve got the bones of what AVC was, and a crop of writers doing their best to hew to the house style despite AVC having lost a good portion of what made that style work.
I think that’s one way of looking at it. I think it’s more that the writers at one time were hired according to their alignment to the overall values of the publication. Time was, AV Club actually took a specific position, perspective, worldview etc. So it was sarcastic, smug, snarky in a particular direction.Now it’s just directionless, borderline nihilistic, snark.
Welp, AV Club Commenter Fallon Is On the Hot Seat For Mocking Aging Dinosaurs…Again
The latest actor who no one asked to weigh in on this but felt the need to anyway is Game of Thrones’ Ciarán Hinds…1) The Independent asked him about his current project, The Dry, in which he shares a sex scene with his real-life wife of 35 years, Hélène Patarot. His comment about sex scenes and intimacy coordinators was borne out of that discussion.2) I know this site has been a glorified Tumblr post for years now, but if you looked up Hinds’s body of work and thought, “Oh that guy from Game of Thrones”, it says more about your cultural illiteracy than it does about his distinguished career.
I wish this site was anywhere near as good as Tumblr.
Hinds has had such an interesting and incredible career. Huge fan of his work.One of his best small roles in a US production is his appearance as an FBI agent in Miami Vice. He’s only in two or three scenes max but he conveys so much about the man in those brief moments.
Show some respect to the best Julie Ceasar of all time. Plus so many Irish films I can’t shake my stick at them all.
Never shake a stick at *anything* Irish. That’s how you get snakes!
…and of course, who can forget his magnanimous role as CGI-something-or-other Steppenwolf in Justice League… or his reprisal of that very same character in Zack Snyder’s Justice League!?
Rightly or wrongly, certain actors become fused with their great performances for me. While I’ve seen in Hinds in other stuff where he’s killed it, he’ll always be Caesar for me. (The fact that he had such great interplay with Tobias Menzies as Brutus helps a lot.)
Yes!!!!Fav line from him is his fake outrage about Pompeii, “He refuses to meet me!” as he laughs with Antony. So good!
This! He was a consul of ROME!
Rome! That’s what I recognized him from! Man, that was bugging me.
I just told my boyfriend that just before I read your comment. Whenever the Ides of March roles around, I think of him in “Rome.” If he’s played Caesar on stage, I hate that I have not seen it.
Yeah! He was the Devil in Ghost Rider 2!
::sigh:: Yep. The downward slide has a fucking flavor.
“This skepticism is almost certainly a generational thing”Yeah, you literally just quoted him saying EXACTLY that. Did you even read what you copied and pasted?For fuck’s sake, you just had TWO PARAGRAPHS of him saying it’s a generational thing and explaining that he sought the opinion of his daughter.
It’s not “generational.” It’s a bunch of limp dicks who are now mad they don’t get their woodies fondling women half their age with none of their privileges. At work. Next.
That’s just not true and you know it
Sorry, sweetie – I actually do know it. Since we don’t have money to hire an intimacy coordinator, I deal with the blocking. Most adult male actors are fine, those who aren’t are a problem. And frankly I don’t want women on my sets going through what I went through as a newbie actress.
No one cares about whatever low budget community theater bullshit you work on.
Look how much you care you stupid idiot.
Enough to spend 30 seconds telling you that you’re fat?
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Sorry – I forgot to add ugly.
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You’re a troll trying to start a fight.
This is why we need qualified intimacy coordinators: because otherwise, the work gets put in the hands of people with really bad attitudes.
“Most adult male actors are fine, those who aren’t are a problem.”Really? I need to write this down: good ones are good, bad ones are…not good?
I don’t think it’s that in all cases. I think it’s definitely that in some, or even many, cases (Frank Langella, etc.), but I think sometimes it’s just a blind spot that they don’t want to interrogate. I don’t get the impression that he wants to do anything inappropriate (as much of an impression as I can get from these snippets, anyway). He just doesn’t understand that “we talked about it an everything was fine” is just his perspective, and that the woman might have a different perspective on whether everything was fine. It’s a harmful attitude anyway, though.But I’m sorry you experienced the bad ones. 🙁
Leaving aside any other considerations (ethical, psychological) for a moment, I think intimacy co-ordinators just make a lot of practical sense. You have fight and stunt co-ordinators for everyone’s safety, you have choreographers on hand to make dance scenes work. Have an intimacy co-ordinator around to have sex scenes run as smoothly as they can.
It obviously makes a lot of sense. But you have to look at it from their perspective. Sean Bean wants a fight coordinator because he doesn’t want his nose accidentally broken. If there’s no fight coordinator, he might suffer. If there’s no intimacy coordinator, it’s hardly ever the man who will suffer. So because there’s no danger in it for him, he doesn’t see the need for a coordinator. Classic bias. It’s not a problem for me so it’s not a problem.
“If there’s no intimacy coordinator, it’s hardly ever the man who will suffer.”Right, because all men WANT to expose themselves, right? All Male actors are 100% comfortable taking sex, which is pretty obvious with the current discourse, right?
“Sophie Turner has been candid about the rape scenes she had to film (something House Of The Dragon walked back, fortunately) and did not hire an intimacy coordinator to make any of these scenes safer.”I don’t think Sophie Turner herself was in charge of whether intimacy coordinators were hired…
Now I’m imagining my dad asking me about intimacy scenes.