How an intimacy coordinator start-up is making sex scenes safe for actors

Vanessa Coffey maps out intimate moments on set for stars like Billie Piper – and now businesses want her to set boundaries in the workplace too, she tells Andy Martin

The Australian-born businesswoman wants the industry to understand the importance of boundaries

(Strevas)

In the boardroom or bedroom, does anyone really know what they are doing any more? TV and film were the first to admit: we need an intimacy coordinator! Enter Vanessa Coffey and the company she co-founded, Strevas.

Coffey has led a double life, earning a living as a lawyer and actor. She was born in Sydney and was a child star, appearing in adverts selling the vitamins with her grandmother (and they must have worked: her grandma is now 103). But she took law and French at the University of Technology, inspired by having to appear on the witness stand on behalf of her mother at a constructive dismissal case. “I should have been in school uniform,” she says, “since that is what I was: an innocent schoolgirl”.

Coffey qualified as a solicitor in 2002 and went on to practise corporate law where she specialised in mergers and acquisitions, “or murders and amputations as we used to call them”. But she was drawn back into acting and took up a scholarship at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2005. “I felt I was missing out on the creative side,” she says.