SCOOP: UTA Drops Intimacy Coordinator, Choreographer, Dancer Clients
As Hollywood reduces sex onscreen (Gen Z’s not interested, thanks), one worker tells me ‘less intimacy is being written’
I cover TV and host Ankler Agenda with Elaine Low. I wrote about how film schools are scrambling to keep up with industry disruptions and reported on agents’ concerns about a market chill amid Netflix’s deal to acquire Warner Bros. Email me at elaine@theankler.com
United Talent Agency will no longer represent intimacy coordinators, choreographers and dancers, I’ve learned from multiple sources — part of the greater Production Arts department, which also reps other below-the-line craftspeople including top cinematographers and art directors. Two agents were impacted by the decision that took effect Nov. 6, and clients were emailed about the move sometime in October.
According to a source close to the matter, the agency decided not to scale this part of the business, which represents a small fraction of its larger below-the-line clientele.
Intimacy coordinators are brought in to work with actors, directors and costume designers on scenes that involve nudity and simulated sexual or romantic contact. The relatively new on-set role arose in Hollywood around 2017 in the wake of #MeToo, creating heightened awareness of performer consent and comfort on set. (HBO’s The Deuce was the first TV series reported to have an officially titled “intimacy coordinator” on set.)
UTA was the only of the Big Three agencies to rep intimacy coordinators, and the move comes as the role gains traction elsewhere: The first-ever IC collective bargaining agreement was ratified with SAG-AFTRA on Thursday, providing these workers with protections such as wage minimums, overtime pay, travel provisions and contributions to the union’s pension and health plans. The new agreement takes effect in late February 2026.
‘Less Intimacy Is Being Written’
UTA’s decision had come as a surprise to the four different intimacy coordinators I spoke to for this story, all of whom had been repped by the agency for as little as six months to two-plus years.
“It was a real bummer,” says Zuri Pryor-Graves, an Atlanta-based sex therapist-turned-intimacy coordinator who signed with UTA a couple years ago and has worked on Will Trent, Beyond the Gates and Tulsa King. Like the other ICs who spoke to me, she didn’t have representation until she was approached by the agency. (Not every below-the-line profession typically has agency representation.) “I didn’t even know it was a thing until they reached out to me, and I was grateful, because we rely so heavily on word of mouth and hoping that somebody’s going to call.”
Clients say they weren’t told the reason behind the agency’s decision to stop representing ICs, choreographers and dancers. Work has been slow this year for many ICs. Even when they are hired on a TV series, their contribution to a show usually lasts only a few days over the course of filming. “I could be on a show for six months and work three days,” says Pryor-Graves.
Brooke Haney, a longtime IC who has worked on Elsbeth, Law and Order: SVU and the upcoming Sundance film Bedford Park, says that this year was the slowest they’ve had. Still, work very recently picked up — the New York City-based Haney worked on four films and a vertical drama in November alone.
A recent Elle feature by Moira Donegan on intimacy coordinators questioned whether ICs still have a place on TV and film sets in a post-#MeToo era, particularly as actors such as Anora’s Mikey Madison have declined the opportunity to work with them. (“We decided that it would be best just to keep it small,” Madison said of the decision she made after the filmmakers, director Sean Baker and producer Samantha Quan, offered her the option. “We were able to streamline it, shoot it super quickly.”) Pryor-Graves gets the sense that some shows might be shying away from intimacy on screen as producers and writers grapple with their own comfort (or discomfort) with including more intense sexual scenes. She has seen scripts with a fair amount of intimacy in the screen direction shrink to a hug or a kiss in execution.
“I think that there is a state of Hollywood and entertainment right now, where it seems like less intimacy is being written,” says Pryor-Graves. “With the birth of intimacy coordinators, our goal was to work alongside creative and just create safe spaces for these things to be written so that more could be written and they can be done more safely. And I think the way that Hollywood has responded has been to say, ‘Okay, if you guys feel like we needed so much policing, then maybe we just won’t do it.’ It’s just less of a headache to just not do it, which is completely not the point.”
Appetite for sex on screen is a mixed bag. According to UCLA’s most recent Teens and Screens report, more than 48 percent of Gen Z respondents think there’s “too much sex or sexual content in TV and movies.” On the other hand, Heated Rivalry is the water cooler show du jour as people flock to, as my colleague Lesley Goldberg put it, the horny hockey hunks show.
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New Legitimacy
As the debate around the necessity of having on-set ICs heats up — Vanity Fair ran a piece earlier this week asking a similar question — so has awareness of what intimacy coordinators bring to a set and how they operate.
In the past, Haney recounts, “when I was interviewed [for a job], producers would be like, ‘Okay, I gotta be honest, I’ve never worked with an intimacy coordinator before. Tell me what you do.’ Now, they know what I do, and they know how to interview me for it, and that’s awesome.”
Haney attributes this, in part, to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA contract that emerged from the strikes, which established that producers need to make “best efforts” to bring on an IC for any nudity or sex scenes. Thursday’s ratification of ICs’ first contract is a further mark of legitimacy for the profession.
Another mark of industry legitimacy and respect? Representation from a major agency. UTA had been proactive in recruiting new clients for its IC roster, sending reps to industry events hosted by professional training groups like the SAG-AFTRA-accredited Intimacy Directors and Coordinators.
Los Angeles IC Erin Tillman, who was one of three intimacy coordinators on Ryan Murphy’s All’s Fair, says there was an “immediate wow factor” in being able to say that she was repped by UTA, which approached her earlier this year.
“I’ve been in the television and film business for over 20 years in various capacities,” says TIllman, who is also a certified sex educator. “I think most of us know it’s hard to get a legitimate, huge entity to represent you, so it really felt like a big win for sure.”
It made professional conversations easier, she says. Tillman, like everyone else who spoke to me about this story, has positive things to say about her now-former agents at UTA.
Still, the four ICs I interviewed had varying degrees of success obtaining work through the agency. Some continued to rely on word of mouth or existing connections that pre-dated their representation.
Ariel Leigh Cohen, who has been in this profession since 2021 and whose credits include The Rehearsal, says she has worked as an IC on about 45 vertical dramas, including ReelShort’s popular How to Tame a Silver Fox. Cohen is one of the few busy ones, with work doubling year over year.
She approached UTA at an intimacy coordinator summit earlier this spring, where the agency was looking to add more ICs to its roster. By April, she was a client. Cohen says UTA was “very helpful” in brokering contracts on microdramas, a format that’s a heavy hitter in the romance genre. Work on microdramas is largely non-union.
UTA took microdramas “just as seriously as any other work project, because they’re fairly consistent and they comprise a fair amount of intimacy work right now,” Cohen says. “It’s been standardized that intimacy coordinators are on set for any moments of intimacy, including just kissing, on all microdrama sets. Having that standard is fantastic, because we have a lot of folks coming out of school who are creating these productions, and it’s being standardized for all of them and all of these up-and-coming actors.”
Cohen says current microdrama rates are about $550 for eight hours, plus prep days. That is “deeply discounted” vs. the standard $1,200-plus for a 10-hour SAG-AFTRA shoot day. Whether the new minimums — which will be higher than the current rates — will have an impact on demand for ICs in the vertical drama space isn’t yet clear. Still, the number of pages that these low-budget productions shoot in a day means that ICs can accomplish a lot in one eight-hour shoot day.
It’s hard to say what kind of impact the new SAG contract will have on ICs who work in microdramas, now that they will have to command higher minimums. For now at least, these former UTA clients won’t have to fork over 20 percent of their paychecks to their reps. And ICs like Tillman are hoping for the further normalization of intimacy coordinators on set.
“Most of the entities I’ve worked with in the last four or five years as an intimacy coordinator really respect this position, and they get the depth and gravity of the fact that society is so shame-filled about talking about sexuality,” she says, “let alone boundaries or anything else having to do with bodies.”
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the correct day rates for intimacy coordinators on SAG-AFTRA TV series.