Ewan McGregor uses an intimacy coordinator for sex scenes with actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead — even though they are married.
McGregor, 52, and Winstead, 39, star in A Gentleman in Moscow premiering Friday, March 29, on Paramount+. In the series set in Russia in the early 1900s, he plays Count Alexander Rostov who has a romance with Anna Urbanova, portrayed by his wife. McGregor explained that they needed a coordinator to help them be comfortable on the set.
“It’s still necessary, because it’s also about the crew — and it’s odd to be naked in front of people. It’s odd to be intimate in front of the camera,” the Star Wars alum told UK magazine Radio Times in an interview published Tuesday, March 19.
“If you were doing a dance scene, you’d have a choreographer,” McGregor added. “It’s an important part of the work now, because it’s somebody that the director and actors meet in the middle.”
The couple have been married since 2022. and they will celebrate their second wedding anniversary next month.They share one son, Laurie, 2. Winstead is McGregor’s second wife. He was previously married to Eve Mavrakis from 1995 to 2020. They have four daughters: Clara, 28, Esther, 22, Jamyan, 21, and Arouk, 21.
McGregor and Winstead met on the set of Fargo in 2017. They began dating that year after Winstead separated from her first husband, Riley Stearns. Their eight-year marriage ended in divorce in 2018.
McGregor’s daughter Esther is following in her parents footsteps as an actress, and she appeared with her father in the 2022 Disney+ series, Obi-Wan Kenobi. In discussing the need for intimacy coordinators, McGregor mentioned they would be extremely valuable to a young actress like his daughter.
“If an older, famous director goes to a 22-year-old and says, ‘I want you to be naked in this scene,’ that actress might feel, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got to do it, my career might depend on it.’ And then five years after that, she could look back and go, ‘I wish I hadn’t. Why am I naked in that scene?’ It’s unnecessary,” he said.
“Now there’s somebody she talks to whose career doesn’t rest on the shoulders of this person,” McGregor added.
The use of intimacy coordinators began in the past 15 years and demand grew with the Me Too Movement in 2017.
Titanic star Kate Winslet recently said she wished she had access to an intimacy coordinator earlier in her career.
“I would have benefited from an intimacy coordinator every single time I had to do a love scene or be partially naked or even a kissing scene,” Winslet told The New York Times earlier this month. “It would have been nice to have had someone in my corner because I always had to stand up for myself.”
Winslet added that she would have spoken up, saying, “I don’t like that camera angle. I don’t want to stand here full-frontal nude. I don’t want this many people in the room. I want my dressing gown to be closer.”
“Just little things like that,” Winslet noted. “When you’re young, you’re so afraid of pissing people off or coming across as rude or pathetic because you might need those things. So learning to have a voice for oneself in those environments was very, very hard.”
