The actor Christopher Eccleston has claimed an A-lister falsely accused him of inappropriately touching her while filming a sex scene.

The star of Doctor Who and True Detective said he feared the accusation from the unnamed actor could have caused the end of his career.

“I did a sex scene with an A-list actress – not Nicole Kidman, who was brilliant – and she implied, in front of the crew, that I was copping a feel because she didn’t like me,” Eccleston, 59, told the Independent (the actor starred alongside Kidman in the 2001 film the Others).

“I’ve never felt more betrayed by a fellow actor than I did that day. I have to say to you that I would sooner have put my hands in a food blender than copped a feel of that person.”

Eccleston said he believed the incident would not have happened if there was an intimacy coordinator on set (a professional who choreographs intimate scenes) and called the accusation an “abuse of power” by his co-star.

He added: “I could have been accused of all manner of things … that’s about what passes between actors, with trust and the abuse of it.”

He said he was “fortunate that happened to me before the Harvey Weinstein stuff came to light, so I wasn’t put in the stocks for it”.

Eccleston stars alongside Jodie Foster in the highly anticipated new season of True Detective. He called Foster “a heroine of mine for many years” and said he had “never have taken such a small role if it wasn’t” for the actor.

The pair worked with an intimacy coordinator on the show, which Eccleston called “a wonderful innovation in the industry. Not just because it protects people, but to creatively decide how a scene should be played.

“If I were a writer, that would be very important to me – because the way people have sex is how they communicate.”

Eccleston said he and Foster discussed “how we’d gone through the mill with sex scenes in the past, when you just had to fend for yourself”.

He said over the years he had come to realise he is more vulnerable than he once thought. “As a bloke, as a young man, you walk on to the set and see the majority of people in the crew are male. Then there’s a beautiful woman who’s naked. So unless you are a complete arsehole, you just continually ask her: “Are you comfortable? Is there anything I can do?”

But the intimacy coordinator told him she was there to protect him too, he said. “I’d not thought about that. You don’t think that maybe somebody’s copping a look at you. You just don’t, not from a working-class northern British background. I was born in 64, when men were really not the objects of desire as far as I knew.”

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