Wouldn't That Be Great? - Keneilwe Matidze Intimacy Coordinator

Keneilwe Matidze — lawyer, casting director, intimacy coordinator — is changing what it means to feel safe on a South African set.
There is a particular kind of intelligence that moves sideways. Not up a single ladder, but laterally — gathering tools from unexpected places, arriving somewhere no obvious path could have predicted. Keneilwe Matidze is that kind of thinker.

She studied law at Wits, served her articles at Webber Wentzel, was made associate and then senior associate in the firm's media law department, specialising in privacy and defamation. And then she left. She left to act. And from acting she moved into casting. And from casting — almost by accident, almost by necessity — she became one of South Africa's first intimacy coordinators.

We meet on a weekday afternoon, and she is warm, precise, and funny in the way that lawyers sometimes are — careful with her words, but not cold. When she tells a story, she tells it fully. When she makes a point, she makes it land.

On leaving law for the industry she'd always loved:

Matidze was acting before she ever picked up a law textbook — auditioning, performing, building the instincts that would later serve her in ways she couldn't have anticipated. Law, she says, was never the destination. It was protection. "It gave me strength and power," she says. "And because the law applies in everything, I'm able to look at things from a factual point of view — to be objective between two parties." But the real gift of her legal training, she suggests, was something quieter and more personal than contract literacy. It was the knowledge that she didn't have to say yes.

She was nineteen or twenty when a director on one of her early acting jobs — a show on which she was playing a sex worker — asked her, mid-shoot, on an open set, to remove her bra. Nothing of the sort had been discussed in advance. She called her agent. The response was breezy, unhelpful: Oh, I'd just take it off. I've got great boobs. Matidze sat with that for a moment. And then she thought about her law degree. "I'm studying law right now," she remembers thinking. "I don't know where this could take me. I don't have to say yes to this. I've got a backup." She didn't take it off. "It protected me in that way already."

That moment planted something. A quiet, growing conviction that if she — with a law degree and all the self-possession it conferred — had been standing on the edge of that particular cliff, what was happening to the actors who had no such foothold?

On the accidental birth of an intimacy coordinator:

The formal turn toward intimacy coordination came while she was working as a casting director on Adulting (Showmax), a show that would require explicit content from its cast. Actors weren't showing up to auditions. She understood why.

"When I'd ask people, 'Are you comfortable with intimacy, kissing scenes and sex scenes?' and people would say yes — you could see their body tensing up." She started paying attention to that gap between the word and the body. She started saying: Please be honest. She started waking up at 3 a.m., rethinking her scene selections, wondering if the language she'd chosen for sides was too sexual, whether she'd been asking something of actors before they'd been given the information to consent meaningfully.

One night she found herself Googling intimate scenes and stumbled onto intimacy protocols — the formal frameworks that had been developed, largely internationally, to govern exactly these situations. The next day, she told a friend about a promise she'd made to her actors: that she would be with them from casting to set, that someone would be there to keep them safe. She didn't have a name for what that person was. Her friend told her about the Netflix/NFVF training programme. She applied the following morning.

"I wanted to keep that promise," she says simply. "I did not know what I'd just described to my friend, but there's something about people who work on set with sex scenes — and I think I should be that."

On rewriting the casting brief:

For most actors, the intimacy disclosure in a casting brief has long been a single, maddening line: Must be comfortable with intimacy and nudity. Matidze finds this inadequate in almost every direction. "Before, I wouldn't have put 'must be comfortable with this,'" she says. "I'd say this would involve explicit scenes, right? And it's up to the actor to choose."

Now, where scripts are available and intimacy is a meaningful part of the story, her briefs are different. She reads the scripts first, identifies which characters carry intimate content, and specifies: intimate kissing, touching, simulated sex scenes, for these characters specifically. Not every production arrives with scripts ready, and not every show requires it — but in circumstances where it is necessary or applicable, she adds something she considers crucial: that these scenes will be facilitated by an intimacy coordinator, conducted in accordance with intimacy protocols. "That gives people an option to say: I might not be comfortable or sure, but I am comfortable working with an intimacy coordinator."

She also asks actors to name what they are not comfortable with — not to disqualify them, but to begin a conversation. An actor who won't kiss might still be exactly the right person for the role. A body double might solve what seemed like an impasse. The conversation has to start somewhere, and for Matidze, it starts in the brief. She's had a young actor send her a completed nudity rider in response to a casting call. She received it with something approaching delight. "It makes them think for the future: Okay — what am I wanting to do?"

On what vulnerability looks like from the casting chair:

There's something unusual about sitting across from a casting director who also coordinates intimacy. Matidze is, in that room, both the person assessing whether you're right for the role and someone who has already committed to your protection on set. She's aware of the particular dissonance this can produce.

"A lot of people come into my rooms because it says: okay, I can be as honest as possible." The knowledge that the person across the table has a duty of care changes the quality of the audition. Great actors who are tense, self-conscious, or frightened by what the role might require of them cannot give what they actually have. Matidze describes it as softening — not lowering anyone's standards, but removing the interference. "Once you've kind of softened them and created a safe space, I win. Because I get to do good castings. We don't miss out on the true talent."

She's brought intimacy coordinator tools into chemistry reads and audition rooms, guiding actors through exercises when a scene's staging is ambiguous, when nobody is sure whether the moment should end in a kiss or not. The casting process, she suggests, is no longer separate from the set process. It's the beginning of it.

On acting coaching and what she calls emotional athletes:

Beyond casting and intimacy coordination, Matidze also works as a acting coach — and the through-line in all three roles is the same: she is interested in what is standing between an actor and their work. Not in technique, exactly, but in the psychological weather around it.

She talks about imposter syndrome, about the particular agony of being cast after a long drought of rejection, arriving on set and feeling certain that someone has made a terrible mistake. "You feel so desperate that you have to prove — and then it ends up not being even that. You can't control how people are going to receive it. Sometimes you try so hard it becomes quite stiff, or it falls flat. Whereas you can just relax and enjoy it."

She works with a fellow acting coach who calls actors emotional athletes, and Matidze has adopted the framework with evident affection. A six-episode series is a sprint. A 139-episode telenovela is a marathon. You have to pace yourself. "We don't remind actors of how to take care of themselves on set," she says, with the slightly weary precision of someone who has watched a lot of talented people run themselves into the ground. "Especially with long form — 12, 13 scenes a day, continuously getting into emotions. It's such a thin line that you cross into living your character, because you're not aware of how to leave the character behind."

When asked for a memory she keeps — a moment that confirmed she was doing what she was supposed to be doing — she doesn't single out a scene or a conversation. She names the entire first season of Adulting.

"I'm scared to say it was like every day was a spiritual experience," she offers, and then she says it anyway. She was wearing three hats simultaneously — casting director, acting coach, intimacy coordinator in training — and walking with actors from the audition room all the way through to a set that required 38 sex scenes. She didn't even make it to the end of the shoot; she had to break away to begin another casting. But what she'd promised those actors — that she would be there, that someone would be there — held.

"We had the most respectful set. The actors were amazing to work with, and I left it going: we did a really good job and we enjoyed it." The cast and crew still talk about it. What that first season established — in tone, in trust, in care — shaped everything that followed. "It also showed me what I am capable of doing," she says. "I got to discover myself on that set through all those hats I was wearing."

On what fearless means:

Her Safe Sets biography contains a mission statement: to make the TV industry a space for free and fearless creative expression. I ask her what fearless means to her now, after everything — whether it's something she's building toward or something she's already begun.

She thinks about the actor she was. She thinks about the set where the tape ran out, where her bra was slipping, where the actor opposite her was quietly panicking, where neither of them was creating anything — they were managing a crisis.

"Had I had an intimacy coordinator," she says — someone to specify what she'd wear, how it would be secured, to ask are you okay? — "then at least there'd be somebody I could speak to fearlessly and freely. So when I get to set, I don't have to worry about that stuff. And that's the creative expression — being able to create in a place where you feel taken care of. Where you don't have to worry about all these other things, and you can just focus on the creation."

She pauses. And then, with the particular pleasure of someone who has been working toward something for a long time: "Wouldn't that be great?"

Keneilwe Matidze is a Johannesburg-based casting director, intimacy coordinator, actress, and acting coach. She is a Safe Sets-affiliated intimacy coordinator and one of the first cohort trained through the Netflix/NFVF South African Intimacy Coordinator Programme. She served as casting director and intimacy coordinator on Showmax's Adulting Season 1.