The Body in the Room - A conversation with actress and intimacy coordinator Carla Classen

There is a moment Carla Classen returns to often. She is younger, still studying, watching films with the double vision that actors rarely lose. On screen, characters kiss. Off screen, her mind lingers elsewhere.  "How are people just fine?" she remembers wondering. Not about the story, but the bodies behind it. "How do you just know you're supposed to do that?" Even then, something didn't sit easily. The gap between what audiences consumed and what performers endured fascinated her — and unsettled her. She assumed, at the time, that discomfort meant inadequacy. A lack of strength. A personal failing. Years later, she would recognise it as something else entirely.

A breaking point

Classen's entry into intimacy coordination wasn't a neat career pivot but a slow accumulation of dissonance. She remembers hearing about the role in the periphery — media conversations, the ripple effects of #MeToo, a colleague beginning training. But it wasn't until a television production during the pandemic that the abstract became visceral.

She was exhausted, newly married, recovering from COVID, carrying the emotional residue of a storyline that had kept her character depressed for months. Then came the scenes.

There was no budget for an intimacy coordinator, she was told — though there was money for a single Zoom consultation. The meeting revealed fractures immediately: directors with conflicting visions, gaps in communication.

"I was already burnt out," she recalls. "And then suddenly you're trying to understand — how is this actually going to be shot?"

In that meeting, when asked for her perspective, something cracked open. She spoke about feeling unsafe — not just in the scene, but within the production itself. About the absence of accountability. About gendered violence playing out nightly on television screens in a country already saturated with it.

The response was swift and familiar: she had "misread" things.

Not long after, a call sheet arrived. The director she had aligned with was gone. A replacement stepped in. A breach of consent followed.

Her agent intervened. They took out the intimate scenes for the next day until more discussions could be had, and finally an Intimacy Coordinator was provided.

That night, on a call with an executive producer, she found herself repeating a sentence that still shapes her practice: "I'm a human being. We are not all the same. We cannot assume that everyone will have the same needs."

It took years before she formally trained. But by then, the work had already begun forming its philosophy inside her.

Safety as a practice, not a promise

Ask Classen what safety means, and she does not offer platitudes. She begins with the body.

"The first thing that comes to mind," she says, "is when someone makes an offer, and my body doesn't go, 'Oh — is this weird?'"

Safety, for her, is not abstract. It is the absence of suspicion. The ability to play without second-guessing intention. The sense that your body is part of storytelling, not an object being consumed.

In theatre, she often felt that baseline. A shared understanding that bodies are tools in service of narrative, held within trust built over time. Film and television, by contrast, compress vulnerability into fragments — minutes to deliver something that will live forever.

"You're aware of the camera. You're aware of being consumed," she says. "On stage, you command the gaze. On screen, you're trying to preserve a moment inside a machine."

This tension animates much of her thinking: the difference between spaces designed for exploration and those built for extraction.

The third person in the room

If there is a through-line in Classen's work, it is the necessity of the third party. The person whose only responsibility is safety.

She describes watching actors now with new eyes — noticing vulnerability in posture, breath, hesitation.

"They're actually looking for safety," she says.

But she resists the idea that safety can ever be guaranteed. No coordinator, she insists, can promise a harm-free space. Too many variables. Too many people. Too many unseen histories.

Instead, she talks about accountability. About the willingness to meet harm when it happens — to stay in the room, to investigate, to repair.

Training complicated her earlier certainties. Once, she admits, she held hard lines between right and wrong, villain and victim. Now she pauses longer.

"Is this person behaving badly because they're an asshole? Or because they're scared?"

The distinction matters. Not to excuse harm, but to address it meaningfully. Quick punishments, she suggests, can become ways of avoiding deeper cultural reckoning.

A South African case study

Working in South Africa shapes everything. The industry's fragmentation — linguistic, cultural, economic — demands constant code-switching. Classen has moved between these spaces as an actor and now as a coordinator, learning to read rooms quickly, adjust language, recalibrate authority.

"What marginalises you is often your greatest strength," she says, recalling advice from mentor Kate Lush.

She speaks of entering different sets and navigating entirely different dynamics: race in one room, gender in another, hierarchy in the next. The work requires sensitivity to context that global conversations sometimes flatten.

It also offers possibility. In a younger industry still defining its standards, intimacy coordination can stretch beyond sexual content into broader care: violence, trauma, exhaustion, cumulative harm.

"The education is happening," she says. "Slowly."

Care, choreography, and the frame

Does she see herself as protector, mediator, choreographer?

"It depends what the set requires," she says simply.

Her choreography philosophy is less about rigid blocking than frameworks — anchor points that allow freedom within structure. Plans that adapt to bodies, heights, environments, emotions.  Safety as scaffolding, not constraint.

Ultimately, she returns to a single aim: creating conditions where people can do their best work.

"I want people to feel free enough to play," she says. "That's the goal."

Lightness in strange work

Despite the gravity of the field, Classen insists on humour. Not as deflection, but as relief.

"Sometimes we need to acknowledge how weird it is," she laughs.

She believes that naming the strangeness of the work — the vulnerability, the artificiality, the fact that deeply intimate acts are being constructed under lights and cameras — can diffuse shame. It reminds everyone in the room that intimacy work is both deeply serious and fundamentally human.

That duality — care and awkwardness, vulnerability and laughter — sits at the heart of her approach.

The long view

When asked about legacy, Classen doesn't reach for grand narratives. She circles back instead to smaller shifts: safer sets, braver conversations, moments where someone felt held.

The work, as she describes it, is rarely visible. It lives in glances, pauses, recalibrations. In the quiet knowledge that something could have gone differently — and didn't.

For Classen, that is enough.

Because beneath the frameworks and protocols, the evolving language and industry debates, the job remains surprisingly simple:

To notice the body in the room.

To make space for its truth.

And, when possible, to make it feel safe enough to stay and play.

Interviewed in March 2026 by Tamryn Speirs with additions by Maude Sandham