Rebecca Ferguson prefers filming sex scenes without intimacy coordinators, relying instead on her strong personal boundaries and ability to communicate them clearly.
The 42-year-old Swedish actress, known for roles in the Mission Impossible series and Dune films, portrays Romani character Kaulo in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. She shares an intimate scene with Cillian Murphy, who reprises his role as Thomas Shelby.
Ferguson’s Approach to Intimate Scenes
Ferguson, a mother of two, explained her stance: “It’s wonderful that we can have intimacy coordinators… but for me, it’s very off-putting and it makes me feel uncomfortable because I have enormous boundaries and I can verbalise them.”
She contacted Murphy directly to discuss their approach. “I had called Cillian and asked him how he wanted to work,” she said. “It sounds so silly, but I said, ‘I’ve studied your sex scenes,’ and he was like, ‘That’s really weird and awkward’. And I went, ‘I know but bear with me. This is not just a regular sex scene. This is not us getting our kit off, getting on with it, bish bash bosh. This is a moment of release. This is a moment of intimacy, there’s magic’.”
Peaky Blinders Film Release and Plot
The movie arrives on Netflix on March 20, following a limited cinema run starting March 6. It continues the story four years after the series finale, with Murphy’s Tommy Shelby returning to Birmingham from exile amid World War II events.
The trailer shows Tommy haunted by his past: “You’ll live in a house haunted with ghosts, of people who died because of you.” Kaulo confronts him: “You abandoned your kingdom, and you abandoned your son.”
Stephen Graham’s character Hayden Stagg remarks that Tommy thought “it wasn’t his war,” prompting Tommy’s reply: “It is now.” Explosions and gang tensions build, as Isaiah Jesus (Jordan Bolgar) identifies Tommy to unfamiliar faces. Tommy reflects: “Once, I nearly got f**king everything… but nearly doesn’t count.”
