Oscar nominee Ciarán Hinds is well known among “Game of Thrones” fans for playing Mance Rayder, the king beyond the wall and leader of the wildlings. Hinds appeared in five episodes of the Emmy-winning HBO fantasy series across three seasons. In a recent interview with The Independent, Hinds got honest about not exactly loving all the sex in “Game of Thrones.”
“I was rather put off by the amount of sexuality that was going on in it, because it was taking away from the actual political storytelling,” Hinds said. “But that’s business, I guess, from their perspective.”
Hinds also spoke to The Independent about the increase of intimacy coordinators on sets in recent years. Hinds’ daughter, Aoife, is also an actor and worked closely with intimacy coordinators while starring opposite Paul Mescal in Hulu’s “Normal People.”
“I was asking her [about them] because it seems to me strange,” Hinds said. “I didn’t come from that generation. 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.”
Toni Collette recently told The Times UK that she has asked intimacy coordinators to leave set in the past because their presence created more anxiety on set.
“I think it’s only been a couple of times where they’ve been brought in, and I have very much trusted and felt at ease with the people I was working with,” Collette said. “It just felt like those people who were brought in to make me feel more at ease were actually making me feel more anxious. They weren’t helping, so I asked them to leave.”
