Lena Headey interview: ‘The weird protection we offer predatory men makes me furious’

**From The Telegraph’s Claire Allfree:**

There’s a moment in Lena Headey’s new BBC radio drama, Intimacy, which takes place on a big budget film set, when the (fictional) intimacy coordinator steps in to prevent an al fresco sex scene taking place directly on top of a bed of pine cones.

I ask the Game of Thrones star whether she too had ever been asked to simulate sex without the director checking whether it would be physically comfortable to do so, let alone exposing.

“Oh, even today you can still be on set where no one really cares [about the actors],” she says. “You can be doing a nude scene and someone will say, ‘Okay, put this large lumpy mat against your groin’. But I’m in my 50s now and I feel more in control. It’s a different game.”

Headey and I are talking over Zoom from New York where she has lived for the past four years with her second husband Marc Menchaca (she has two children from previous relationships).

Her arms are covered with tattoos, she swears like a docker and her thick choppy hair seems to have a life of its own. On screen she has an electric presence and even on a Zoom call there is something untamed and unpackaged about her – perhaps a consequence of being, as she puts it “a blue collar Northerner” (she grew up in Yorkshire) in a predominantly middle-class industry.

She speaks more frankly about sex and nudity in Hollywood than any actress I’ve met.

“When I started out there was this rite of passage all young female actors had to go through, which usually involved snogging and falling in love, and having sex and showing your boobs,” she says. “They’d call them the ingenue parts, to make it sound nicer.

“But I just got on with it,” she continues.

“I didn’t go to drama school so I would just arrive on a set and be, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got a job’. And when it came to those moments, I don’t think I even questioned that I should be safe. Instead I’d go home and cry, or think, ‘Oh, that felt weird and too familiar’. Now I look back and feel, ‘Hmm, that was rough.”

Headey has channelled many of those feelings into *Intimacy*, which she wrote and stars in, and which follows Liza, an intimacy coordinator who is given a big break on a major film only to discover the director is a man who raped her years ago during a job.

He is the sort of dinosaur-with-a-God-complex director who invites his actresses to his trailer at 11pm to discuss the script – and professes not to remember the details of what happened between him and Liza. Or, as Headey puts it, “an old school, I-can-do whatever-I-f—ing-want-type of guy”.

A bit like Harvey Weinstein then?

**The actress, writer and director talks uncomfortable sex scenes, rebuffing Weinstein and why Game of Thrones failed to supercharge her career in the full interview.**

**Read here:** [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/radio/what-to-listen-to/lena-headey-interview/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/radio/what-to-listen-to/lena-headey-interview/?WT.mc_id=tmgoff_reddit_to-listen-to/lena-headey-interview/&accesscontrol=facebookchannel_open)

what about the protection predatory women get?