In her acceptance speech after winning a BAFTA Best Actress Award for her lauded TV series, “I May Destroy You”, actor and writer Michaela Coel dedicated her win to Ita O’Brien, saying: “Thank you for your existence in our industry, for making the space safe, for creating physical, emotional and professional boundaries so we can make work about exploitation, loss of respect, about abuse of power, without being exploited or abused in the process.”

O’Brien is described in her publisher biography as a leading intimacy practitioner for film, TV and theatre. In fact she invented the role, blazing a trail by devising the first ever Intimacy On Set guidelines which are now being used around the world, and have been adopted in leading production houses including HBO, Netflix and the BBC. Previously when working on intimate scenes, directors would typically have told the actors what they wanted and asked them to just get on with getting it on. Now, thanks to O’Brien that often fraught and potentially unsafe state of affairs is radically changing.

Drawing on this pioneering work, and her 40-year career in the performing arts, O’Brien has now written a book, “Intimacy: A Field Guide to Finding Connection and Feeling Your Deep Desires”. And whilst O’Brien’s intimacy coordination credits include such sexually frank productions as “Sex Education”, “Gentleman Jack”, “Normal People” and “It’s a Sin”, her sage and sensitive debut book is much more than a guide to better sex. Rather she seeks to recast how we think of intimacy across a much broader spectrum; starting by forging deeper and healthier connections with our own bodies, before creating safe spaces where we can navigate intimacy, not only in our closest relationships, but also more widely in society. In our world of #MeToo and porn saturation, it couldn’t feel more necessary.

“Honouring and telling authentic human stories; that is what my work is about,” O’Brien tells me when we meet at the offices of her publisher, Ebury. “So bringing that same sense of authenticity to this book was important; exploring ways in which we can take a step back, truly listen to ourselves, and think, what do I actually want?”

In our world of screens we might be more connected to each other virtually, but physically we are increasingly less so, argues O’Brien. Therefore learning to better inhabit our own bodies, before we try to bring them physically together with anyone else’s is vital.  As she takes us through different stages of building intimacy, she includes illuminating exercise sections which draw upon her own ‘embodied practice’, and other diverse teachings from around the globe.

These include 20 Connected Breaths, an exercise designed to bring you to a place of centredness and calmness; Mirror Affirmations as pioneered by Louise Hay by which you practise appreciating your physical self in all its glory; and Body Pleasuring (not quite what you might be thinking). I particularly love her Waterfall exercise as a way of marking a defined end to the working day, important when you work from home as I do.

O’Brien’s lifelong love for and preoccupation with bodily movement and choreography began with ballet lessons at the age of three. Born and brought up in Bromley, Kent, her Northern Irish Catholic mother and Irish Catholic father came separately to the UK and met at an Irish dance in Brixton. While she speaks warmly of her ‘beautiful, fabulous, passionate’ family, O’Brien’s Catholic upbringing was also a strict and traditional one, where – interestingly given her later career – ‘talking about sex and intimacy was just not on the agenda.’

O’Brien trained at the Royal Academy of Dance, and worked professionally as a dancer from the age of 18.  Her first TV role was on the Benny Hill Show, and while Hill himself ‘looked after the dancers who worked for him’, others continually pushed boundaries in terms of the smut and sexual innuendo required. This kind of dangerous and abusive dynamic persisted in the performing arts until it reached a tipping point in 2017 with Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo. By that time, O’Brien had retrained as an actress, and then as a movement teacher and director. Her experience working on the intimate scenes in a devised piece called ‘Does My Sex Offend You?’, which explored the dynamic between perpetrator and victim, crystallised her conviction that a code of conduct was needed. She took the idea initially to actors’ union Equity, and before long her guidelines, admirably distilled to 14 powerful points (you can read them in an appendix to the book), were being endorsed across the industry. O’Brien was then invited to bring her expertise to the making of season one of “Sex Education” which came out in 2019, and from there her career snowballed. O’Brien has since been in high demand and has travelled the globe sharing her practice. And there are now many other intimacy practitioners working worldwide.

“Intimacy” is a beacon of a self-help guide in encouraging us all to nurture relationships that are open, physically confident and which allow us to as O’Brien puts it ‘call boundaries when we need to, and know they will be listened to and honoured’. But the more you consider the issues it raises, the more vital a book it becomes on a societal level too. From the dangers of toxic masculinity to teenagers who learn their sexual behaviour from watching porn, there are many issues with our understanding of what true intimacy constitutes that urgently need to be addressed. Says O’Brien, “Intimacy On Set guidelines are fundamentally about respect for everyone. And that’s no different elsewhere in life.”

“Intimacy” – which feels to me also a shining example of how the performing arts can help us live better lives – is embracingly written for readers of all ages and preferences; for example it includes a sensitive and moving chapter on later life intimacy. But it is when talking about equipping young people for intimacy that O’Brien is perhaps at her most ardent. “Humans are physical beings, hard-wired for pleasure. So instead of this fear-based sex education centred on not getting pregnant, not getting an STD, let’s teach young people that their sexual awakening is a glorious thing. That it goes hand in hand with pleasure, but also with communication and respect. Let’s teach them that intimacy is only ever about freely given consent. And from there we can all create something healthy and beautiful.”

Interview by Caroline Sanderson first published in The Bookseller.