‘Three Women’ EPs Say Having All Female Directors and DPs Added a ‘Sense of Safety’ on Set | How She Did It

“Three Women” executive producers Lisa Taddeo and Laura Eason want to make it clear that their Starz limited series is not meant to capture the experiences of all women. But while they were making the drama, it was vital to them that the set of their intimate and emotional deep dive felt like a safe space for all women.

“Having all directors and DPs that were women I think just added a sense of safety and a shared experience and understanding as we were telling the story,” Eason said in a new installment of TheWrap’s How She Did It, presented by Starz. “Although women, of course, are not a monolith and everyone brought their own experiences and point of view, I think there was just a base level of safety and welcoming everyone’s point of view and perspective that really added to the collaboration.”

“Three Women” is based on Taddeo’s book of the same name, which followed the author and journalist as she chronicled the complex sex and romantic lives of three real-world women. Much like the book, the Starz original follows these women: the hopelessly romantic Lina (Betty Gilpin), the sexually empowered Sloane (DeWanda Wise) and the young and conflicted Maggie (Gabrielle Creevy). Because of its source material and themes, “Three Women” is a show that portrays a lot of sex. To ensure that these scenes were handled with the greatest amount of care possible, Eason and Taddeo enlisted Claire Warden, whose many credits include being the first intimacy coordinator on Broadway.

“We knew from the beginning it was really important for us to have an intimacy coordinator who could really be a full collaborator with us, that would be on for the whole run of the show and was as integral as a department head,” Eason explained.

Warden’s role was especially crucial when it came to Maggie, a character whose love story blurs the lines between romantic and criminal.

“Maggie had a — allegedly, I’ve been trained to say allegedly — had a relationship with her high school English teacher, who was married with kids, when she was a sophomore and junior in high school. When she brought the charges against him, the entire world essentially believed him and not her,” Taddeo explained. “She gets to experience that she had first love with this man. She also gets to hold that he hurt her and he did a wrong thing.”

“Claire being there for all of those moments between Gabrielle Creevy and Jason Ralph, those were some seriously intense scenes,” Eason said. “To hold the notion of this being Maggie’s love story while also this is a crime, to have those two things was so wildly important to me and the directors.”

At the end of the day, Taddeo never sought to create a book or a series for women everywhere. Instead, the author specifically wanted to tell the stories of these three women.

“The reason I wanted to tell it in such detail and with utter honesty and transparency is because I think it is details that move us to empathize with other people and their lives. We need people to tell us their stories so we can listen to them,” Taddeo said.

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