Where Intimacy Begins: Designing the Physical Chemistry in 'Saiyaara,' 'Gehraiyaan' and 'Bad Girl'

On a film set, intimacy used to be the one thing everyone pretended to understand but no one really knew how to handle. For decades, Indian cinema relied on old hacks — a flower, rain, cutting to the mountains.

Now there’s a system.

Cut to 2025, and intimacy coordinators have brought language, structure and consent into a space that never had any. It’s not an add-on, it’s a fundamental shift in how sets prepare for scenes, protect actors and build chemistry with intention.

The Start of a Profession

Aastha Khanna discovered the job long before India did. “I was reading an article in 2019, and everything I had seen as an AD on Indian sets came rushing back. The hush hush scenes, the awkwardness, the lack of vocabulary. There was a market gap. But also a gap in how we understood vulnerability,” she says.

She began training to become an intimacy coordinator soon after, realising that the job wasn’t just about placing bodies but about holding emotional safety. “People think the job is about caution,” she says. “It’s actually about clarity. Once you give actors language and structure, you free them.”

Finding the Language

What intimacy coordinators do is sometimes mistaken for choreography, but the work is closer to translation. You take emotion, instinct, fear and desire, and turn them into something actors can trust.

When director Shakun Batra hired Khanna for Gehraiyaan, she wasn’t walking onto new ground. She was already a DA on the film, familiar with the set and its people, so getting certified as an intimacy coach felt like a natural extension of the work she was already doing. 

“There were six full days of workshops (conducted by intimacy director Neha Vyas) behind what people later called effortless,” she says of Deepika Padukone and Siddhant Chaturvedi’s chemistry. “Every moment had shot breakdowns, emotional mapping, boundary mapping. Intimacy is engineered. The chemistry only looks natural when the groundwork is invisible.”

But it wasn’t instantaneous. “The chemistry actually wasn’t great initially,” she says. “They both wanted to work harder towards it.” The pandemic shut everything down twice. Months passed and comfort shifted. “We had to recalibrate the chemistry almost a year after the first round,” she says. “People forget that actors are also relearning their bodies and their boundaries after long breaks.”

For Ankita Podder, the intimacy coordinator for the Tamil film Bad Girl, the vocabulary was built from emotion. “Varsha [Bharath, director of Bad Girl] didn’t give me steps,” she says. “She gave me feelings. A first time. A breakup that still stings. A hostel room too small for everything this girl is carrying.”  Her task was to translate that into something actors could meet each other through. “Anjali [Sivaraman, protagonist of Bad Girl] told me she was nervous — she hadn’t done an on-screen kiss in a while. Shashank [Bommireddipalli] kept laughing about where to put his hands.”

As South Asia’s first male certified intimacy coordinator, Akshay Murarka approached the language of Saiyaara through comfort. “You cannot choreograph ease,” he says. “You nurture it.” And he found that ease early. The actors, Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda, walked in with more openness than he expected. “They were willing to explore, trust, and be vulnerable from the very beginning.”

The Work You Never See

Film audiences see touch. Intimacy coordinators see everything before and around it.

Podder describes it as emotional reading. “You’re not dealing with machines. You’re dealing with human beings who are invested and vulnerable.” On Bad Girl, she found herself balancing Bharath’s fast pace with the actor’s need for room to breathe. “Sometimes intimacy scenes can feel rushed… or extremely drab,” she says. “You track whose emotions aren’t being paid attention to.”

Preeti Panigrahi, lead actor in Girls Will Be Girls  remembers how even frames were shown to her first. “They would ask, ‘This is all that is visible — if you're okay, we go ahead,’” she says. The sensitivity extended beyond actors. “Nobody was yelling. Nobody was rushing. Running was not allowed on our set.”

And for Murarka, the unseen work is the architecture of trust, through workshops, conversations and boundaries. As he puts it, “I highly advocate for doing workshops before we begin shooting. When actors feel comfortable in their own bodies and with each other, that ease naturally translates on screen.”

And for Khanna, attunement is the invisible labour: “I cannot promise a safe space, but I have to preemptively mitigate anything that could go sideways.” It’s emotionally exhausting work, she says — work most people never see.

Who Decides

Hollywood star Jennifer Lawrence recently said that she opted not to have an intimacy coordinator because she felt comfortable, a comment that received mixed opinions. 

“It should not be the actor’s decision, rather a support production must provide,” Khanna says. “You do not ask whether someone needs an action director. Intimacy should not be optional.”

From an actor’s lens, the nuance is different. Panigrahi, whose performance in Girls Will Be Girls was widely praised, says, “One actor’s comfort cannot speak for everyone. You have to ask each person individually. Everyone has different boundaries.”

She still remembers her first chemistry session with her co-actor. “Shuchi [Talati, director of Girls Will be Girls] would ask before sitting close,” she says. “Before touching my arm. Before anything. I had never seen that level of care.”
There was one moment that changed her understanding of consent entirely. “Someone asked me, 'Are you comfortable if I put my hand here?' And I realised I could actually say no.”

The Gaze and the Responsibility

The question of gaze — and the gender that often gets attached to it — appears in every conversation but refuses a simple answer.

“Training prepares you for any scene,” Khanna says. “Creativity can come from lived experience, but it is not gender dependent. I have seen coercion on sets that were supposed to be the safest.”

For Podder, the gaze on Bad Girl emerged from shared memory. “With Varsha, we were comparing memories,” she says. “Our teenage years. Our awkwardness. Our first crushes. Those memories shaped the sensuality.”

Panigrahi found liberation in the female gaze of Girls Will Be Girls. “It was the first time I wasn’t trying to perform femininity,” she says. “I was just playing a girl.”

Across interpretations, the takeaway remains that the gaze may shift depending on who holds it, but the responsibility stays the same.

When a Scene Breaks Open

For coordinators, the magic rarely happens where audiences expect it to.

Podder’s favourite moment in Bad Girl is under ten seconds long. “They crash into the desk, the wall, the frame,” she says. “It is messy because they are messy. That energy cannot be faked.”

For Khanna, it’s the interval scene in Gehraiyaan. “The fight, the reconciliation, the decision they make. That is when we felt the arc land.”

The moment Murarka remembers best from Saiyaara didn’t even make the storyboard. “Ahaan and Aneet laughed in the middle of a take. That was them being comfortable. That is intimacy.”

Building the New Culture

Intimacy coordination in India is still young, still expanding its vocabulary and reach.

Khanna now runs The Intimacy Lab. “We need a community to shift the industry,” she says. She has introduced chaperoning for minors, workshops for writers and training scaled to Indian cultural contexts. “Intimacy looks different in every part of the country. You cannot copy paste,” she says.

Podder is reclaiming sensuality for the female gaze, while Murarka is building performances on trust.

Together, they are building something Indian cinema never had before. A shared language for bodies, a structure for consent, and an environment where actors stop bracing and start creating.

The audience can only see what the actors and director choose to reveal. The rest stays behind the curtain.