- "The Idol," starring Lily-Rose Depp and The Weeknd, premiered on HBO in June.
- Episode one featured an intimacy coordinator being locked inside a bathroom for doing his job.
An intimacy coordinator said she felt "betrayed" by HBO after the pilot episode of its highly-anticipated and controversial new series, "The Idol."
Marci Liroff, who's worked as an intimacy coordinator for shows like "Hightown," shared her opinion in an interview with Variety published Friday. In the first episode, struggling pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) is taking photos for an album cover when the robe she's wearing slips and reveals a nipple.
The photo shoot is immediately stopped by an intimacy coordinator (Scott Turner Schofield), who reminds the photographer (Eddy Chen) that Jocelyn's contract only permits "side-boob, under-boob, and side flank" and it will take 48 hours to make any changes. Jocelyn's manager Chaim (Hank Azaria) then locks the intimacy coordinator in a bathroom and pays a random person to keep the intimacy coordinator trapped until the photo shoot ends.
Liroff told the outlet she had a "very visceral" reaction to the scene.
"I was appalled," she said. "I'm not alone in this, in terms of my intimacy coordinator communities: We look at HBO as our stalwart home, so to speak, because their work with Alicia Rodis was so good that they made it mandatory that all projects on HBO [featuring sexually intimate scenes] must hire in an intimacy coordinator."
Liroff added that it "set a standard" in the entertainment industry, prompting other streaming services and networks to hire intimacy coordinators.
"So I felt really betrayed that they were making fun of us and the job. They were using us as the butt of the joke," she told Variety.
She also acknowledged that some directors and producers don't understand what intimacy coordinators bring to the table.
"Our position is very similar to a stunt coordinator, and you would never do some of the stuff that [has been done to me] to a stunt coordinator," Liroff told Variety. "So I sat with it and I realized that this actually was a very accurate — although heightened and extreme — depiction of some of the crazy pushback that I've experienced."
She added later: "This job is very nuanced and complex. It's very hard to explain, in one scene, what we do, and that scene used us as the butt of a joke, at the end of the day."
"The Idol" debuted in June, but chatter around the series kicked off long before that. "Euphoria" showrunner Sam Levinson and The Weeknd (Tedros) announced the series in June 2021, but Rolling Stone reported this March that there was some discontent behind the scenes.
A source told the outlet that "The Idol" was initially an empowering story of a young pop star reclaiming her agency after experiencing predatory powers in the music industry, but the original message got lost amid rewrites, reshoots, and Levinson replacing the original director.
After the first episode, some critics dubbed the show "a sordid male fantasy" over its sex scenes and "more regressive than transgressive." Episode two also saw pushback from critics, like British GQ, which described an intimate scene between Jocelyn and Tedros as "the worst sex scene in history."
The Weeknd later defended the sex scene in an interview with GQ, saying it was meant to be "gross."
"However you're feeling watching that scene, whether it's discomfort, or you feel gross, or you feel embarrassed for the characters. It's all those emotions adding up to: this guy is in way over his head, this situation is one where he is not supposed to be here," he said.