I Want Your Sex: Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman BDSM Scenes, Pain Scale

Cooper Hoffman had never filmed a sex scene before signing on to Gregg Araki’s erotic thriller “I Want Your Sex.” So when he arrived on set for the first time and found himself surrounded by ball gags, stilettos, whips, chains, dildos and strap-ons, a few first-day jitters were understandable.

“Even if you’re nervous to do it, you’re gonna do it,” Hoffman told Variety at the film’s Los Angeles premiere on Tuesday night. “Because there’s no reason to not do anything in this life just because you’re scared.”

Still, how does an actor prepare to strip naked, slip into a maid’s outfit and get spanked with a leather whip? This is just one of many, many kinky situations Hoffman encounters as Elliot, a meek, wide-eyed college graduate who enters into a sadomasochistic relationship with gallery owner Erika Tracey (Olivia Wilde).

Increasingly, the answer comes in the form of an intimacy coordinator — a role that Araki, long known for embracing provocative themes, employed for the first time on this project. The profession, which officially unionized with SAG-AFTRA in 2024, has become an increasingly standard presence on film and television sets.

Intimacy coordinator Yehuda Duenyas likens the job to that of a choreographer or stunt coordinator. “If someone is going to get their head blown off, people are like, ‘Go grab the goo gun, get the exploding head with the squibs in it, press the button and boom.’ No one really bats an eye about violence,” he says. “But when it comes to intimacy, everyone gets kind of squishy and weird.”

“There are so many things to look after with intimacy scenes that no one really sees,” he continues. “It’s the same way that, with a stunt, you’re not seeing the padding or the fake hits. It just looks real, but you know there’s a lot of movie magic happening behind the scenes.”

That movie magic is put to work throughout the film, which uses high-intensity montages to establish the pair’s dom-sub dynamic: Elliot crawling across the floor in pink silk lingerie, taking a spanking in a maid’s outfit, standing fully nude as a hot-pink dildo is lubed up overhead and, during a threesome-gone-wrong, getting handcuffed to a St. Andrew’s cross with a towel stuffed in his mouth.

“He might have been terrified, but it wasn’t, ‘I’m terrified, I don’t want to do this.’ It was, ‘I’m terrified, and I do want to do this,’” Duenyas says of Hoffman. “He was more like, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done. Let’s do it.’”

Below, Duenyas talks about how he prepared Wilde and Hoffman for their most intense on-screen moments, the most challenging scenes to shoot and the film’s overall messaging on sex and experimentation:

There are multiple high-intensity montages that establish the nature of Olivia and Cooper’s dom-sub sexual relationship. What would surprise people about what goes into shooting scenes like that?

With those montages specifically, we had moments where we would say, “Okay, I’m hitting you this hard. What is that on a scale of one to 10?” Cooper would say, “That’s a zero.” She’d say, “Really?” Then she would go harder, and he’d say, “Okay, that’s a two. That’s a three. That’s a five.”

Olivia realized, “I can hit you really hard, and it’s only registering as a seven or an eight.” We had a bunch of little things like that so they could, number one, have a language for communicating about the physicality and, number two, feel like they could talk about what was happening while also making it look good.

Gregg told Variety that Olivia came onto the set with much more experience doing nude scenes, while Cooper was “terrified.” What was your process for making him more comfortable from the beginning? 

If you’ve ever gone skydiving, you might be terrified, but you really want to go skydiving. You’re there to do it. Or, if you’ve ever jumped off a cliff into water or stood on a high diving board, you’re on top of that thing to do it, even though you’re scared. So, yeah, he might have been terrified, but it wasn’t, “I’m terrified, I don’t want to do this.” It was, “I’m terrified, and I do want to do this.”

Is someone terrified because they’re thinking, “This is a no for me. This is a hard boundary, but I’m involved in this thing and I already said yes, so what am I going to do?” Are they biting their nails or is it, “I’m fucking terrified. Let’s do this really well. How are we going to do this?”

That was Cooper’s stance. I wouldn’t say he was terrified. If you’ve ever talked to him, he’s super cool and very together. He was more like, “Yeah, yeah, it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done. Let’s do it.” It was very matter-of-fact. He approaches almost everything he does by diving headfirst into it in this really beautiful way. He’s an incredible performer.

How did the dom-sub type of sex scenes differ from the more traditional sex scenes you’re used to working on? 

Sure, there are differences, but in terms of the way we approach intimacy coordination as a craft, it’s not that different. Olivia had also done a lot of research. Everyone brought what they knew and the type of story they wanted to tell. Gregg obviously did as well.

In this particular film, we’re dealing with these very specific, blurry and complicated power dynamics. That’s the story. The story shows up in their relationship, their work lives and their sexual lives together. What was so fun was finding the character of their intimacy together.

Every intimate scene we work on has a different type of character, and that was the character for this one. Is it different? Yes. BDSM and these kinds of lifestyle scenes, if you want to call them that, are different from something like a “Heated Rivalry” scene. It’s a different type of intimacy, but we approach it the way we would approach anything else.

I’m guessing one of the main differences is how many props are involved. What was the most challenging scene to work on? 

The threesome scene, from a blocking and camera-angle perspective, took a minute to figure out. When I say “a minute,” we had a really compressed shooting schedule. We shot all the intimacy within the first five days. We did all of that stuff upfront.

Also from an intensity perspective, that scene required a lot. There was a lot to work out. It wasn’t, “Oh my God, this is so hard.” It was a puzzle to put together in terms of the traffic patterns, the handcuffing and how to get out of the handcuffs quickly. Are we fiddling with keys, or are we just getting out of them? There are a lot of little details. Which details are you going to skip for the sake of the story, and which details are you going to keep in to maintain the flavor and the vibe of the story?

All of the restraint scenes needed a little more care. Getting an actor into restraints on the St. Andrew’s cross wasn’t that complicated of a scene. But when you have to shoot it from three angles in three different ways, and an actor is strapped to a St. Andrew’s cross, can they get out easily if they need to pee?

Gregg recently talked to Variety about Gen Z’s attitude towards sex and what he hoped to accomplish with this film. What are your thoughts on this mission statement?

Gregg wants people to go out and argue. He really wants people to argue about it and say, “Well, I thought it was this,” or, “I thought it was that,” or, “I think that’s bullshit,” or, “I think that’s true.” He wants those conversations. 

I love Gregg, and I’ve loved his work over the years. He has contributed so much. I learned about intimacy through watching Gregg Araki films as a young person. I feel like we owe him for his contribution to intimacy in cinema. He has contributed so much to the film canon. Where would we be without those pieces he has made and the work he has put in?

I can’t speak for Gen Z, and I don’t know whether Gen Z is having less or more sex. But I hope people see this film and want to take a chance on love, take a chance on experimentation, take a chance on feeling something and allow themselves to be taken to a place they haven’t been before.