Consent for Film and TV: Running Sessions at RADA Before Intimacy Coordination Was a Job

For several years I ran regular consent sessions at RADA — with third-year acting students, and separately with directors and producers. The course was called Consent for Film and TV. If that title sounds fairly normal now, it's worth remembering that when we started it, the phrase "intimacy coordinator" barely existed as a working role in British theatre and film. We were teaching something the industry hadn't quite named yet.

Why RADA asked

The honest answer is that people coming out of drama school were walking into rooms where they were routinely asked to do intimate work — kissing, partial nudity, simulated sex — with very little language for negotiating it. They had done acting technique, voice, movement, text. They hadn't been taught how to say "I'm not comfortable going that far on the first read-through" in a way that didn't feel like they were sabotaging their career. RADA, to their credit, saw that gap and wanted to address it before they sent graduates into the industry.

The sessions weren't delivered as a warning. They were delivered as craft. If you're going to be someone's scene partner in a vulnerable moment, here is how you have that conversation professionally. If you're directing that scene, here is how you set it up so that both performers can do their best work without being asked to choose between their boundaries and their reputation.

How the sessions ran

With the students, we worked in small groups. We spent time on consent in an everyday relationship sense — the groundwork — before moving on to audition rooms, rehearsal rooms, sets. We talked about the specific pressure of being a young, unrepresented actor; the specific pressure of wanting to seem "easy to work with"; the way a yes given to avoid awkwardness isn't really a yes at all.

We also brought in working actors — people who were five, ten, fifteen years into their careers — to share experiences. Some of what they described was great; some of it was genuinely awful. The point wasn't to scare the students. It was to let them hear, from people they respected, that the line between a good set and a bad one often came down to whether anyone had bothered to have the conversation at all.

With directors and producers, the tone was different. Less about self-advocacy, more about responsibility. If you are running the room, what you model becomes the norm. What questions you ask, what you don't ask, whether you check in, whether you notice when an actor goes quiet — all of that shapes what everyone else thinks is acceptable. We worked through concrete scenarios, not slogans.

Before intimacy coordination

It's strange looking back. Intimacy coordination as a profession really only took hold in the UK after the #MeToo reckoning in 2017, and then expanded properly as productions started writing it into contracts. When I first walked into RADA to do this work, the idea that a trained third party might be physically present to choreograph and safeguard intimate scenes was still slightly niche.

So the sessions we ran had to do a bit of everything — language, ethics, practical skills, and the quiet message that this stuff was both serious and doable. We were asking a room of performers to take on some of the work a dedicated role would soon take on for them. That's not the ideal, but at the time it was the best thing on offer.

Watching intimacy coordination grow into an established part of British screen and stage since then has been genuinely heartening. When I started, a lot of people thought it was an American import that would fade. It didn't. It filled a gap that the industry had been pretending wasn't there.

What I took from it

Two things that still shape how I teach consent now.

First, that consent is a craft skill before it is a moral position. If you teach it as a rulebook, people either memorise it or resent it. If you teach it as something that makes your working life better — clearer scenes, calmer rooms, sharper performances — people actually use it.

Second, that the people with power in a room are the ones who set the consent culture, not the ones most affected by it. That was true at RADA and it's true in schools. When the adults in charge model checking in, naming limits, and respecting a no, the whole room shifts. When they don't, all the policy in the world won't save it.

If your drama school, training programme or production company is thinking about how to do this well, get in touch.