Um yes, yes they will..
Any hope of Hollywood resuming productions any time soon hinges on the participation of at least one key group: actors. And not everyone on camera is willing to jump right back into performing intimate sex scenes, close-up fight scenes or anything else that involves a lot of close contact on screen.
The mood of actors across Hollywood seems to reflect the contours of the country; some will have the same comfort level with intimacy that they did before the coronavirus started, while others want a whole new level of protections and safeguards before performing. They’re now looking to the guilds, to prominent producers who have proposed plans and to countries that have already shared guidelines about how to safely get back to work.
“Some actors have said to me that their level of comfort of doing intimacy work isn’t going to change. They feel like when they get back to shooting, they get right back up on the horse and keep doing it business as usual,” Amanda Blumenthal, an intimacy coordinator who runs Intimacy Professionals Association told TheWrap. “I’ve talked to other actors who are incredibly concerned, and they don’t feel comfortable resuming doing intimacy work the way we did it pre-COVID. They feel like they would need a lot more reassurances in the form of testing to know that the risk was significantly lower.”
As actors and the rest of Hollywood await the formal guidance of SAG-AFTRA and the other guilds, the Screen Actors Guild is looking closely at three key areas in making any guidelines: sanitation, testing and intimacy. Effectively, how do you handle proper social distancing on set with access to hand sanitizers and proper cleanliness; how do you make sure everyone is tested and can be cleared as healthy; and how do you handle scenes that involve actors on screen being in close contact or even intimate without masks?
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