Most actors will eventually find themselves locking lips with another actor who, in real life,
has nothing to do with them romantically. Sometimes, these kisses have little to
no consequences. But other times, onscreen kisses can get actors in trouble in real life.
In 1995, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine aired what proved to be
one of the most controversial episodes of the entire franchise.
Jadzia Dax takes center stage in season 4's "Rejoined," where she's reunited with Lenara Kahn.
Dax and Lenara are "joined Trill," who share their existence with slug-like symbionts that
carry their memories and experiences from host to host over the course of centuries.
With their respective previous hosts, Dax and Lenara were once married. However,
it's forbidden for "joined Trill" to become involved with romantic partners from previous
lifetimes. So, when they kiss, it definitely has consequences.
This happened to be the case in the real world as well. Dax actress Terry
Farrell and the makers of DS9 faced a lot of backlash for the kiss. In the Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine Companion book, producer Ronald D.
Moore said one of their southern affiliates took the show off the air while another producer,
Steve Oster, said he received plenty of calls complaining about the episode.
In the 2018 documentary What We Left Behind,
Farrell seems more than content with her part in the episode, saying:
"Still to this day, people come up to me and say, 'Thank you.'"
Sadie Sink entered the cast of Stranger Things in the show's second season as Max,
eventually becoming part of the team of young heroes investigating all the crazy stuff going
on in Hawkins, Indiana. While Dustin holds a torch for Max for most of the season,
it's Lucas who shares a first kiss with her in that season's finale. On the face of it,
there didn't appear to be anything particularly controversial about the kiss, but that changed
once enough fans caught an episode of the aftershow series, Beyond Stranger Things.
There, Sink revealed her kiss with Lucas wasn't originally in the script, and she didn't know
about it until the day the scene was filmed. Ross Duffer, one of Stranger Things' showrunners,
apparently jokingly told Sink that it was her fault the kiss was added. Duffer had
previously chided Sink about having her kiss Lucas, and according to Sink, Duffer said the
fact that she was, quote, "so freaked out" by the idea is what inspired him to add the scene.
"You reacted so strongly to this. I was just joking. You were so freaked out that I was like,
"Well, I gotta make her do it now!"
A lot of fans expressed rage over the story,
due in no small part to it coming to light around the same time as the #MeToo movement.
In the wake of the controversy, Sink backtracked a bit, telling TheWrap:
"I mean, of course I was nervous [...] But I never objected to [it] or felt pushed into anything."
Billy Bob Thornton and Aneglina Jolie met in 1999 on the set of the dramedy Pushing Tin.
In spite of a 20-year age difference, they married in 2000. However, their marriage ended
with divorce in 2003. According to Thornton, the main reason they ultimately didn't work as
a couple was their different lifestyles. In 2018, he told HFPA in Conversation:
"Hers is a global lifestyle, and mine is an agoraphobic lifestyle. So,
that's really — that's the only reason we're probably not still together."
Besides this, Thornton said one of the more memorable stresses on the marriage
was his explicit scene with Halle Berry in the 2001 romantic drama Monster's Ball.
Thornton explained to Speaking to The Sun how filming Monster's Ball made things tough:
"She is one of the most beautiful women in the world, and I am talking on the phone to my wife,
and she says, 'What have you been doing today?' [...] Other people's situations are hard,
with areas of doubt. But if you are a thousand miles from home on a film set
simulating sex with a beautiful woman, it's even tougher."
Decades after its 1971 release, the dark comedy Harold and Maude is considered
a classic. But the film wasn't so well-regarded when it hit theaters,
and it helped steer the career trajectory of its male lead to unwanted destinations.
Harold and Maude is about a death-obsessed man in his early 20s who drives a hearse,
stages bizarre fake suicides for fun, and regularly attends the funerals of
people he's never met. It's at one of these funerals that Harold meets the elderly Maude,
who likewise goes to funeral services as a hobby. The two become lovers — a notion
that didn't sit well with audiences. The Guardian reported that Charles Mulvehill,
one of the film's producers, told Peter Biskind that no one wanted to see these characters kiss:
"You couldn't drag people in. The idea of a 20-year-old boy with an
80-year-old woman just made people want to vomit."
Bud Cort said kissing Ruth Gordon on the screen was both, quote,
"a blessing and a curse." Professionally speaking, he was typecast right away and
only offered what he called "weirdo" roles. He turned them all down, including the role
of Billy Bibbit — ultimately played by Brad Dourif — in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
On the other hand, Cort expressed pride in helping bring Harold and Maude to life. He
told The Guardian he made lasting friendships on the set of the film, including with Gordon.
In How I Met Your Mother, Jason Segel got in trouble for kissing
co-star Alyson Hannigan — who played his wife, Lily — for two reasons.
First, because kissing him bothered Hannigan, and second, because it put him in debt to her.
Segel was a smoker when the show began production,
and Hannigan isn't a fan of kissing smokers. She told Digital Spy in 2008:
"I cannot stand cigarette smoke."
She said kissing Segel was, quote,
"like kissing an ashtray", clarifying that he did use things such as mints to mask the taste.
Hannigan explained that Segel tried to use her distaste of smoking as motivation to quit:
"When we started the pilot [for How I Met Your Mother], he was like, 'Get me to stop smoking,
I'll be your best friend.' So we did this bet where he would owe me $10
every time he had a cigarette. After the first day, he owed me $200."
Hannigan recalls that Segel succeeded in giving up cigarettes for a while,
but that he started smoking again when under stress.
Thankfully, it doesn't seem like the butts stopped the pair from remaining friends.
When they appeared together on the The Talk during the lead up to the How I Met Your Mother finale,
Hannigan openly wept at the idea of not working with Segel anymore.
Tommy Davidson claimed in his 2020 memoir Living in Color: What's Funny About Me
that kissing Jada Pinkett Smith while filming the 1999 romantic comedy Woo
almost got him into a fistfight with her husband, Will Smith.
According to his memoir, neither he nor his co-star were happy with how the film ended.
So, Davidson said he pitched the idea that actually wound up being the film's finale,
with him and Jada Pinkett Smith dancing in the middle of a city street. But while
Davidson and Smith had agreed on the new ending, Davidson added something without
letting Jada know first. When they filmed the scene, Davidson kissed her without warning.
Davidson says as soon as the scene was done filming,
an enraged Will Smith followed him into his trailer, where things nearly got violent:
"If a black man get mad at you from Philly, and come at you, you best be ready."
Thankfully for everyone involved, the actress stepped in and calmed things down between her
husband and her co-star. Davidson says that he and Smith remain good friends to this day.
William Shatner doesn't enjoy the best reputation in terms of how he treats his co-stars,
but there's at least one scene in Star Trek: The Original Series that Shatner, Nichelle Nichols,
and anyone else involved should be proud of, no matter what former colleagues say of them.
In the 1968 Star Trek episode "Plato's Stepchildren" — airing only a year
after the U.S. Supreme Court deemed interracial marriage legal — Shatner and Nichols treated
audiences to the first kiss between black and white actors on scripted TV. In the scene,
Shatner's Captain Kirk and Nichols' Lt. Uhura are forced to kiss each
other by a group of aliens who style themselves after the ancient Greeks.
In her 1994 memoir, Beyond Uhura, Nichols wrote that NBC wasn't happy when they learned of the
kissing scene, and a deal was struck between the network and Star Trek's producers that two scenes
would be filmed — one in which Kirk and Uhura kiss and one in which they didn't. Not wanting
the kiss-less scene to air, Shatner and Nichols purposely bungled them so they wouldn't be usable.
While NBC was worried the episode wouldn't play well in the South, Nichols, Shatner and
the rest of the cast and crew were disappointed by a very different locale's reaction. "Plato's
Stepchildren" joined a list of four Star Trek: The Original Series episodes the BBC refused to air
until 1994. The British broadcaster's official reason for banning the episode, however,
was the sadism displayed by the episode's villains rather than the interracial kiss.
In season 3 of the crime anthology series Fargo, Ewan McGregor pulls double duty as twin brothers
Emmit and Ray Stussy. Emmit is a successful businessman, and Ray is a down-on-his-luck parole
officer. The conflict between the brothers gets heated after Ray falls for one of his parolees,
Nikki -- played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. She convinces Ray that his brother owes him
more than he's given. At first, you might get the impression Nikki is using Ray
for her own benefit, but it soon becomes clear her feelings for him are genuine.
It apparently wasn't too difficult for Winstead to act like she loved Ray Stussy because it wouldn't
be too long before McGregor and Winstead would become a couple -- in spite of both
being married when they met on the set. While we don't know exactly when their relationship
started, it seems clear that working together on Fargo had something to do with it. In May 2017,
a month after Fargo's season 3 finale, Winstead announced her break-up with husband Riley Stearns.
And early in 2018, McGregor filed for divorce from his wife of 22 years.
After McGregor and Winstead were spotted kissing in public, People claimed that an
unnamed source said the pair had been involved since Winstead's separation.
In November 2017, Star Trek: Discovery featured the first kiss between two men
in the franchise. In the episode "Into the Forest I Go," Paul Stamets nearly
dies when he uses his body to perform 133 consecutive warps with Discovery's spore drive
in order to give the crew the edge they need over the Klingon's ship, the Sarcophagus.
"If we can save Pahvo, defeat the Klingons and do all this, 133 jumps it is."
After the battle is won, Stamets agrees to one more jump to a Federation starbase.
On his way to make the jump, he finds his husband, Dr. Hugh Culber, and gives him
a loving kiss before assuring him that after he's done, they'll be taking a long vacation.
Actors Wilson Cruz and Anthony Rapp predictably faced a backlash from part of the audience.
In an eloquent and cutting Facebook post, Cruz
let those fans know he wasn't going to be made to feel guilty for a kiss:
"I'm not here for your comfort. That's not why we are here.
We're here to grow. Star Trek is and has always been here to challenge
you to look outside of yourself and to see other people and other experiences in yourself."
In at least one case, it wasn't so much an onscreen kiss that got
an actor in trouble as much as it was an avoided kiss that helped to tank a movie.
In spite of superstars Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie in the lead roles for the 2010 romantic
thriller The Tourist, critics panned the flick. One of the more recurring criticisms
leveled against the film is the lack of chemistry between its romantic leads,
including kissing scenes that failed to excite anyone. A story that leaked
about a month before The Tourist's release may provide a hint as to what went wrong.
In November 2010, the Daily Mail reported that audiences would be cheated out of a
steamy shower scene between Depp and Jolie. According to their source,
when Depp's longtime girlfriend, Vanessa Paradis, learned of the sequence,
she reportedly begged Depp to pull out of the film. Depp refused to quit the movie,
but he gave Paradis the concession that he would demand the shower scene be scrapped.
It's only speculation, but considering what Depp was willing to do to placate Paradis' jealousy,
it doesn't feel like a stretch to wonder whether or not this
impacted his overall performance in the film.
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