It's a small world, as the saying goes. Running into an ex can be quite daunting as it is,
but imagine working with them. Now imagine part of that job is pretending to get
intimate. Cringing yet? Here are the awkward details of exes who had to film love scenes.
While their characters were playing a game of cat and mouse on The Big Bang Theory, sparks
were flying between Kaley Cuoco and Johnny Galecki off screen. The pair quietly dated for two years
during the early seasons of the hit show, with the relationship ending in 2009. After their real-life
breakup, their characters, Leonard and Penny, got together on the show around the same time.
Cuoco later admitted that shooting those love scenes with her ex-boyfriend was very awkward.
"Just glad to hear you're comfortable saying you love something.
You really want to get into this right now?"
Cuoco said on the Armchair Expert podcast:
"When we broke up, obviously it was a little sensitive for a minute, but I remember those weeks
that [show creator Chuck Lorre had written these episodes where all of a sudden our characters
were, like, sleeping together every other second. Johnny and I would talk and I'm like, 'I think
he did that on purpose.' […] All of a sudden these characters were all up on each other."
Cuoco and Galecki took it all in stride, however,
with Galecki even attending his ex's wedding to equestrian Karl Cook.
He played the troubled, bad boy vampire with a soft side. She played a damsel in distress
and his love interest. So when Ian Somerhalder and Nina Dobrev became an item back in 2010,
they immediately became every tween's dream couple. Between the various
appearances at Coachella, the smitten ways they spoke about each other in interviews,
and the undeniable on-screen chemistry as Damon and Elena, these two were a sight to behold.
When they broke up in 2013, questions arose about what would happen to their characters and those
steamy love scenes on The Vampire Diaries. Like the professionals they are, the exes were still
able to so convincingly portray lovers that they won a "Favorite On-Screen Chemistry Award" at the
People's Choice Awards in 2014. Somerhalder and Dobrev came out of the split so smoothly
that their acceptance speech made fun of their precarious situation. They pointed out how,
despite their real-life break-up, their characters were still together, with Dobrev joking:
"It's a good thing it's not awkward!"
Somerhalder even kissed his former lady love.
If the Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears' break up was an earthquake in early 2000s pop culture,
the split between Adam Brody and Rachel Bilson was equivalent to an apocalypse.
InStyle wrote an entire piece about how painful the break up was.
As with many Hollywood love stories, Brody and Bilson fell in love on the set.
They played high school sweethearts, Seth and Summer, on The O.C.
and began dating in 2003. They were together for three years, but stunned their young fandom when
rumors of their split began circulating. The final dagger was placed in teenage hearts all
over the nation when a source confirmed the news to People, with the source revealing:
"It was a typical romance and they just grew apart. They've been on and off for a while now."
A few weeks later, FOX announced that The O.C. would end its run after four seasons.
Brody and Bilson remained amicable enough that they maintained their on-screen romance.
"And I know I don't deserve another shot but I love you and I think you love me too."
Lovebirds Seth and Summer got the beautiful, tear-jerking wedding they deserved.
Rumors that Penn Badgely and Blake Lively were an item offscreen began circulating almost
immediately after Gossip Girl began airing. Though Lively tried her best to quash those rumors,
ultimately, she had to give in after paparazzi caught them vacationing in Mexico.
The pair was reported to have started dating in 2008, but split sometime in 2010. Their
breakup was apparently so silky smooth that co-workers didn't even know it had happened.
Writer and producer Joshua Safran famously told Vanity Fair:
"I found out on the set of the Season 2 finale that Blake and Penn had broken up
months before. They kept the breakup hidden from the crew, which you could never do now.
I don't even know how they did it. They kept it from everybody which is a testament to how good
they are as actors. Because they did not want their personal drama to relate to the show."
Though their breakup was seemingly cordial, it still made things secretly uncomfortable.
In 2015, Badgley admitted on Watch What Happens Live
that kissing Lively on Gossip Girl was not so great post-break up.
"I'd say best, I'll say, I'll say it was Blake because we actually had a
relationship at the time. Right. And then the worst, maybe Blake after we broke up."
They say if the fairy tale has a happy ending, that means it's not over. That was the case for
Chad Michael Murray and Sophia Bush, who met on the set of One Tree Hill and started dating
in 2003. The two took things to the next level two years later and tied the knot.
But the honeymoon phase ended quickly when the pair announced they were getting divorced
five months after their wedding. Murray called the divorce a "very difficult time," because
the two still had to work together and producers on One Tree Hill reportedly made the experience
unbearable. Bush said in an interview on Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast:
"They made practice of taking advantage of people's personal lives and not just for me
and for my ex - for other actors on the show who would share [...] deeply personal things
that were happening in their lives and they would wind up in storylines. It wasn't okay."
Bush and Murray have thrown shade at each other over the years, and while they've
never mentioned each other by name, it's safe to say we won't be seeing a reunion anytime soon.
Ross and Rachel. No other couple could compare to those two back in the 90s. Over the course of
Friends, they took on other romantic partners before eventually making their way back to
each other at the end of the series. One of those other partners was Tate Donovan as Joshua Burgin.
Their chemistry on-screen was great, but behind the scenes, Donovan admitted that working with
Jennifer Aniston was quite painful. The pair met in 1995 and were together for two years
before Donovan appeared on Friends. His time as the recently-divorced Joshua was short lived,
since he and Aniston were going through a break up in real life. Donovan told Us Weekly in 2018:
"I was just happy to be on the team. The only bummer was Jennifer and I were breaking up at
the time. And so that was tricky to sort of act, and act like we are just meeting each other,
and falling in love, or whatever, interested in each other, when we're sort of breaking up."
Eleven years, two babies, and one split later,
Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts continue to be the perfect exes, with a breakup almost
as poetic as their union. Though they were together for over a decade, they never married.
They announced their split in September 2016, just ahead of a press tour for their movie
Chuck, in which they played husband and wife. In their joint split announcement, the exes said:
"Over the past few months we've come to the conclusion that the best way
forward for us as a family is to separate as a couple."
While they weren't technically broken up at the time,
things probably weren't great between the pair during production. But Schreiber had
nothing but rave reviews for Watts' role as his on-screen wife in Chuck. He told People in 2017:
"I remember the first day that she came out of the trailer in the leopard print with the
fake boobs and the hair. She just went for it. I just knew it was going to be fun."
Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake first met in 2003 at the Kids' Choice Awards and began dating
sometime after. They were on and off for a while until they finally split in 2007.
Rumors about why they broke up involved several other Hollywood elite actresses.
Timberlake was linked to Scarlett Johansson, though she denied they were
ever in a relationship. Timberlake was also linked to Jessica Biel,
which proved to be true since the two went on to date, get married and have two children.
While the specifics of Diaz and Timberlake's split have remained murky,
the exes have worked together twice post-break up, with their roles as cousins in Shrek the Third
and their on-screen romance in Bad Teacher. Their fully clothed love scene in the latter
left everyone feeling like they wanted to unsee it. Film critic Roger Ebert
described it as "pathetic" and claimed it "had the preview audience recoiling." We
can only imagine how strange it was for the exes who actually had to perform it.
Time doesn't seem to have made filming love scenes any better between Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan.
The actor admitted that filming an intimate scene with his ex-girlfriend on Twin Peaks
was fairly awkward. Dern and MacLachlan were an item 25 years before they
played Dale Cooper and Diane Evans on Showtime's third season of the hit show.
The two dated from 1985 to 1989 after meeting on David Lynch's masterpiece Blue Velvet.
When they reconnected on-screen in 2017 for Lynch's Twin Peaks,
MacLachlan felt it was worth the wait. Describing his ex as "a very special
person," he told Ellen Degeneres that while Lynch was effective in making them comfortable on set,
when it was go-time, it was still strange. MacLachlan said:
"She looked great by the way, I gotta say. [...] We had a couple laughs for sure."
At least they had a sense of humor about it.
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