So many of us have dreamed of getting romantic with our favorite movie stars, and we all suspect
they have an incredible time kissing each other on screen. But in reality, cinematic history is
full of kissing horror stories. Here are a few actors who couldn't stand kissing their co-stars.
There's a serious occupational hazard when you're kissing somebody in a movie:
bad breath. Many celebrities are in the infamous bad breath club,
and a good example was trying to capture Will Smith and Eva Mendes kissing in the comedy Hitch.
Mendes was nervous about kissing Smith, and she turned to her favorite comfort foods,
tuna fish with tons of onions and Doritos. Needless to say, Smith didn't dig it.
“I saw that going differently in my mind.”
Mendes then downed a ton of Altoids to get rid of the "stank breath special,"
and things went much more smoothly after that.
Whatever it took to get through, it apparently worked because an opinion piece on Entertainment
Weekly recently hailed Hitch as "the greatest rom-com of all time," and Smith and Mendes
also kissed each other at the film's premiere, hopefully before Mendes ate any comfort food…
"Whoa, whoa, you alright?"
"Oh, no. Yeah, no I'm fine."
Speaking of celebrities with bad breath, Jennifer Lawrence is also a member of this club. The secret
got out when Liam Hemsworth spilled the beans on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
“But if we had a kissing scene she would make a point of eating
garlic or tuna fish or… you know… something that was disgusting.”
Furiously backpedaling, Lawrence later responded,
"I was never like, 'Hey Liam, I just ate tuna and garlic on purpose!'
I just would happen to eat something. I didn't change the way I was eating for the kissing,
which is different than eating something on purpose. Is it worse?!"
She added that if she was kissing Christian Bale or Bradley Cooper,
she would definitely brush her teeth. Apparently, Hemsworth didn’t make the cut,
but the tables were turned when JLaw had a kissing scene with another big star.
Bradley Cooper received bad marks in the kissing department from Jennifer Lawrence. While promoting
the third Hangover film, Cooper confessed to Graham Norton that during the production
of Silver Linings Playbook, Lawrence told him he was a wet kisser. Cooper candidly admitted,
"You don't want to hear that. It was not a compliment."
And given that Lawrence gets bad notices from her co-stars for her
own smooching skills, that's really got to hurt.
The real irony of all this? Cooper and Lawrence were nominated for Best Kiss at the MTV Awards,
proving that A-list actors are more skilled than you realize at convincing us that they're having
a wild, passionate time on screen, when nothing could be further from the truth.
In Interview with the Vampire, Kirsten Dunst got to kiss Brad Pitt right as he was becoming one of
the most desired men in America, and she got paid to do it. But she didn't like the experience at
all and reportedly didn't kiss a boy again for another five years. Dunst was 11 at the time.
“I hated it so much because, I don’t know, Brad was like
my older brother on the set and it’s kinda like kissing your brother. I don’t know.”
Years after the fact, Dunst stood by her quote and her
initial impression that kissing Pitt was gross.
“Although I thought it was disgusting. It was like,
I was 11 and it would’ve been weird if I was like this is amazing! I’m kissing Brad Pitt!”
It's not easy to build up romance on the set of a superhero film.
In the 2002 version of Spider-Man, Kirsten Dunst had to kiss Tobey
Maguire as he was hanging upside down — except this was happening in the rain.
As director Sam Raimi recalled,
"When he was doing the scene, I remember the water was falling down into his upside down nostrils,
so he was kind of drowning. But it was a kissing scene. So he had to pretend
like it was a pleasant, sweet moment for him, when in fact, he was semi-drowning."
Maguire himself remembered,
"I couldn't breathe and I was gasping for breath out of the corner of Kirsten's mouth.
Poor girl. I was giving her mouth to mouth rather than kissing her.
But in the midst of that, I was sneaking some pleasure out of it."
Kissing on screen is awkward enough, but it's especially awkward when you have to
do it in front of family or with a close friend. Many have wondered if
there was any real-life romance between Leonardo DiCaprio and his frequent co-star Kate Winslet,
but it was hard to get the sparks flying when her husband at the time,
Sam Mendes, was directing the movie, 2008's Revolutionary Road.
Never mind the fact that they'd starred together in Titanic, and having to stay
afloat in a giant tank all day long isn't real sexy. Neither is having to make out
with your co-star with her husband watching from the director's chair. Winslet recalled,
"It was more that neither Sam nor Leo seemed the slightest bit bothered. [...] I was like,
'Is it just me who feels a bit weird about this?' You know. My friend. My husband."
When working with Tom Cruise on Mission: Impossible 2, Thandie Newton recalled that
kissing Tom Cruise was "slightly icky and sort of wet." Newton then rather bluntly stated,
"I'd go home at the end of the day actually moaning."
She also spoke firsthand on how difficult it is to get romantic
with a full production crew looming over you, making sure everything is just right:
"You're lying there, you've got 30 people around you, prodding all bits
of you to make sure that certain things aren't being seen and others look good."
Newton also pointed out that the pitfalls of a kissing
scene extend beyond slobbery garlic breath:
"You can't kiss too hard because then your face sort of spreads across the
other person and it looks terrible. You find that
you're thinking more about whether or not you're squashing him than kissing him."
Another reason why kissing on-screen isn't authentic: It's not spontaneous.
Cinematic kisses often have to be planned out because of all the different camera angles
involved. It's an intricate task no matter who's behind the camera, and you certainly
won't enjoy it if you're working with Woody Allen, who, according to Helena Bonham Carter,
was a total control freak mapping out her love scene in the indie comedy Mighty Aphrodite.
In addition to being the film's director, it was Allen and Bonham
Carter who were supposed to lock lips. As Bonham Carter explained,
"Allen tells you up front the certain ways of kissing he does not want.
No exchange of liquid is permitted. [...] It can be a bit offensive
because he makes no effort at all. It's like kissing the Berlin Wall."
Trust us, kissing the Berlin Wall is no great fantasy for anyone.
Faking romantic chemistry on screen is incredibly tough,
which is why actors make the big bucks. They can fool you into thinking they're really into it,
when nothing could be further from the truth.
Julia Roberts had trouble being the romantic foil to Nick Nolte in I Love Trouble because
they both hated each other. Roberts called Nolte, quote, "completely disgusting," Nolte replied
that Roberts was "not a nice person," and they refused to do many scenes together, with stand-ins
performing them instead. Roberts and Nolte did indeed kiss in the film, but it was probably
easier to negotiate peace in the Middle East than to get those two together for a love scene.
There were also reportedly problems with Roberts kissing her co-star Clive
Owen on Duplicity because she loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
"I think you like the idea."
But the biggest problem Hugh Grant had with Roberts when they were making Notting Hill
was trying to get his lips around her mouth. As Grant told Andy Cohen,
"I've probably made too many jokes about the size of her mouth. She might hate me by now."
Brokeback Mountain was a groundbreaking film that starred Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath
Ledger as two gay men who can no longer deny their secret longing for each other, despite living in
a time and place where such a relationship will not be tolerated. Great actors can convince you
of anything, but the romantic scenes between Gyllenhaal and Ledger were rough going, to the
point where Jake was injured when he and Heath tried to make out. As Gyllenhaal recalled it,
"Heath almost broke my nose in a kissing scene. [...] He grabs me and he slams me
up against the wall and kisses me. And then I grab him and I slam him up against the wall
and I kiss him. And we were doing take after take after take. [...] We had other scenes
where we fought each other and I wasn't hurting as badly as I did after that one."
Getting back to breath issues, Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller were in The Spectacular Now,
where building believable onscreen romance was clearly rough going. As Teller explained,
"I would be drinking a Gatorade right before a kissing scene. [Shailene] would be like,
'Are you serious? You're gonna kiss me after that?' I was like, 'Yeah,
I am.' She would take these herbal supplements,
and they tasted like crap. And she would always eat them right before we had a kissing scene!"
"You want some."
"I'm good."
"Really?"
"Yeah, I'm good."
One time Teller told Woodley, "Shay, you just ate dirt," and she countered,
"Miles, you just ate licorice," and so on. And as Miles devilishly confirmed,
"We put stuff in our mouths so we could just offend each other."
It doesn't seem like this kind of exchange would leave anybody hot and bothered,
so if they looked really passionate on screen, they deserve the Academy Award.
Fans of the Harry Potter franchise spent a decade watching characters like Harry Potter,
Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, and more grow up before their eyes. Of course, that means the
characters' respective actors grew up together, all of which made things extremely awkward for
Rupert Grint and Emma Watson when they had to kiss in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
“Neither of us were really looking forward to it. I mean, cause it’s always gonna be kind of a
strange thing to kiss someone, a friend really. Someone I’ve known for 10 years.”
For her part, Watson said she "ended up pouncing on Rupert" to get it all over with.
Another actor apparently in need of Altoids is Ben Affleck,
at least according to Sandra Bullock. She reportedly diplomatically tried to offer
Affleck breath mints when they were making out during Forces of Nature.
Aflleck also had difficulties kissing a man in the comedy Chasing Amy. He said that kissing
a man can be "the greatest challenge an actor can ever face," and he added that
"it was just difficult for me you know? And I didn't think it would be. I really backed
down from it in a way. I really could have done more of a committed job."
He even told The New York Times,
"The kiss is in there, but it looks like Tom & Jerry.
It's not anything good. I tried to go open-mouthed, but something in me was,
"Take your tongue back.' And I was like, 'No, you can do it! Push!' It was not my proudest moment."
How many men have dreamed of kissing Marilyn Monroe? Well,
Tony Curtis was one of the lucky ones — he got to make out with Marilyn in the comedy
classic Some Like It Hot – but when asked what it was like to be intimate with such a
legendary Hollywood sex symbol, Curtis replied that it was like, quote, "kissing Hitler."
Curtis later disavowed what he'd said, stating,
"I said it as a joke. I mean, it was such a darn stupid question, so I gave a stupid answer."
Yet making out with Marilyn Monroe wasn't exactly a dream come true,
either — although he'd been facetious when he compared her to one of history's most
reviled figures, he went on to point out that when the cameras rolled,
"[The kiss] was awful. She nearly choked me to death by
deliberately sticking her tongue down my throat into my windpipe."
There go the fantasies of millions of men…
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