This integrated approach of therapeutic support feels quite revolutionary, as Platt mentioned on Twitter and unfortunately is a practice that, until the Me Too movement, wasn’t always followed.

As the architect of safe spaces on set, O’Brien worked closely with the artist well-being practitioner, Louise Platt, a qualified psychotherapist, who was on call to provide emotional and psychological support for the actors while they performed sensitive content.įehinti Balogun and Paapa Essiedu in I May Destroy You. To ensure this realism is enacted safely, each beat is composed down to the placement of hands or a certain number of thrusts in order to protect the actors’ emotional and physical boundaries.

That’s why Ita O’Brien, a U.K.-based intimacy coordinator, was vital to the construction of these intimate moments, choreographing each move, or “beat” as O’Brien calls it, to create a seamless structure of intimacy and realism between the actors. For Kwame, the ramifications of assault aren’t confined to the isolated incident his trauma is later triggered by the physical acts of intimacy.Īs trauma reverberates through these characters’ lives, it’s important that the actors portraying them are psychologically safe and supported. The police officer who dismisses him when he reports the crime reflects how not all sexual assaults are taken seriously. Experiences like his are often used to victim-blame survivors, as if their initial consent counts as permission for blurring all sexual boundaries. On a Grindr date, Kwame, a queer Black man, has a disturbing encounter in which sex begins consensually but undeniably ends in assault.

During a trip to Italy, Terry, a struggling actress, is manipulated by two men into having a threesome. But as the show progresses, we learn that her two best friends, Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), have also experienced varying degrees of exploitation. I May Destroy You predominantly follows Arabella (Michaela Coel) through her journey to uncover the perpetrator who drugged and sexually assaulted her on a night out.

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