Gwyneth Paltrow told intimacy co-ordinator to ‘step back’ before sex scenes with Chalamet

Gwyneth Paltrow has said she told an on-set intimacy co-ordinator to “step a little bit back” when filming sex scenes with Timothée Chalamet, because she would feel “very stifled” by someone telling them what to do.

Chalamet, 29, stars in new movie Marty Supreme as a ping pong protégé, while Paltrow, 52, plays the wife of a rival professional who falls into bed with him.

“I mean, we have a lot of sex in this movie,” Paltrow told Vanity Fair. “There’s a lot – a lot.”

However, she said she had been unaware of the increasingly common use in Hollywood of specialists to oversee such scenes. “There’s now something called an intimacy co-ordinator, which I did not know existed.”

Intimacy co-ordinators became fixtures on productions in order to make actors feel safe in the wake of the Me Too movement, which exposed abuse in the industry.

Actress-turned-wellness guru Paltrow, whose last starring film role came 10 years ago, recalled how the Marty Supreme co-ordinator asked if she would be comfortable with a certain move during one intimate scene.

“I was like, ‘Girl, I’m from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on’,” she said.

“We said, ‘I think we’re good. You can step a little bit back’.”

Paltrow continued: “I don’t know how it is for kids who are starting out, but… if someone is like, ‘OK, and then he’s going to put his hand here,’ I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that.”

In 2022, Dame Emma Thompson defended the use of intimacy co-ordinators on film and TV sets, calling them “fantastically important”, after fellow actor Sean Bean said they “spoil the spontaneity” of sex scenes.

Paltrow joked that the age difference between her and Chalamet only really dawned on her when they were filming the sex scenes.

“OK, great,” she recalled thinking. “I’m 109 years old. You’re 14.”

She described her co-star, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, as “a thinking man’s sex symbol”.

“He’s just a very polite, properly raised, I was going to say kid… he’s a man who takes his work really seriously and is a fun partner.”

Paltrow won an Oscar in 1999 for the Harvey Weinstein-produced Shakespeare in Love, and was later among the first high-profile people to accuse Weinstein of sexual harassment.

She has played Pepper Potts in several Marvel movies in recent years and appeared in the Netflix series The Politician, but said she considers Marty Supreme to be her first serious film role since 2010’s Country Strong.