How ‘Yaga’ Changed Carrie-Anne Moss’ Mind About Intimacy Coordinators

Yaga, Crave’s new witchy thriller airing on AMC+ in the United States, was the first time that star Carrie-Anne Moss worked with an intimacy coordinator, she tells TV Insider.

“I was a little bit resistant, to be honest, in the beginning because I had never worked with one before,” she says, but now that she’s worked with one, The Matrix legend understands that it’s like having a “fight coordinator.” It “makes sense” to have someone coordinating intimate movement that both tells a story and makes the actors comfortable with how they’ll look, Moss says, “instead of just jumping off the cliff and trying to make it real. I appreciated that.”

Yaga reimagines the Slavic myth of Baba Yaga as a contemporary mystery thriller set in a small coastal town. Moss plays Katherine Hargrove in Yaga, a mysterious woman who loves her independence and has a great sex life. Noah Reid plays Charlie Rapp, a private investigator hired by a wealthy family to find their missing son/heir, Henry Park (Hudson Williams). Rapp teams up with local Sergeant Carson (Clark Backo) on the case.

In Yaga‘s first two episodes, available as of October 23, Moss and Reid’s characters share a steamy scene in their first meeting, but it ends at flirtation. Moss will have more intimate scenes as the series progresses.

AMC+

“The intimacy coordinator was really helpful. I’d never worked with one before, and I wasn’t even sure, I didn’t really understand it, and then learned through the experience that it was almost like having a fight coordinator, so that was good,” Moss explains. “I’m used to having that, but it was helpful, someone that’s looking out for you.”

“I didn’t feel like she was protecting me because I didn’t feel I needed protection,” she clarifies, “but that she was looking out for maybe the right angle that I would feel good about seeing at the end of the day, that kind of thing.”

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Intimacy coordination is a relatively new position on film and TV sets, but one that has grown in awareness and popularity in recent years thanks to romance-focused shows such as Bridgerton and Outlander.

Actors used to have to coordinate these scenes themselves with their directors. Now, intimacy coordinators serve a function similar to stunt coordinators. They establish how an intimate scene will be acted out through conversations about personal preferences with the actors and artistic direction with the director. Yaga‘s intimacy coordinator was Amanda Cutting, with assistance from Phay Moores.

“It was an interesting process,” Moss tells us. “I didn’t really get it. You’re used to things the way you’re used to things, and then I grew to understand that that was really great and good to have,” she continues, saying that Cutting “was great” to work with.

“She did a really good job, and I thought that it did really help,” the Memento star says. “She’s got her tricks. There’s tricks for everything, and who knew? And yeah, it was great.”

Yaga consists of eight episodes. The first two are available now, and one episode comes out weekly through December 4.

Yaga, Fridays, AMC+