Game Of Thrones actor Ciarán Hinds throws his opinion into the sex scene discourse

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.”