Audiences love when on-screen romances get steamy. But behind the scenes, it's not always
the stuff of dreams. Whether it was due to bad acting, weird memories, or embarrassing
injuries, here are some love scenes that actors wish they could take back.
Jennifer Lawrence has had multiple romantic scenes with some of Hollywood's dreamiest
leading men. But it wasn't until the 2016 sci-fi drama Passengers that one of her love
scenes went beyond kissing. She had to get cozy with her handsome co-star, Chris Pratt,
but she wasn't entirely comfortable with the premise. As she told The Hollywood Reporter,
"It was really bizarre, it was really weird. Everything was done right, it wasn't anybody's
fault, nobody did anything wrong, it's just a bizarre experience."
Her discomfort stemmed from guilt over the fact that Pratt was married at the time to
actress Anna Faris. As Lawrence noted,
"It was going to be my first time even kissing a married man, and guilt is like the worst
feeling in your stomach. I knew it was my job, but I couldn't tell my stomach."
The scene came back to haunt Lawrence again months after Passengers left theaters. In
August 2017, Pratt and Faris announced that they were separating, and unfounded rumors
started spreading that Lawrence was somehow involved. She called it the weirdest rumor
she'd heard about herself. Fortunately Faris took the high road, writing in her memoir
Unqualified that she and Lawrence are on friendly terms.
The James Bond franchise is famous for its steamy scenes between Agent 007 and an unending
array of stunningly beautiful women. But things don't always go smoothly backstage. 1985's
A View to a Kill was the last of Roger Moore's six Bond films. He was 57 at the time of the
film's release, making him the oldest actor to ever play the role. But the women Bond
seduces stay eternally young. One of his conquests in the film, May Day, was played by model
and musician Grace Jones, who was 20 years Moore's junior. And boy, did their age gap
create some tension on set.
In his memoir, Moore remembered that Jones would play loud music in her dressing room,
which prevented him from getting his afternoon nap. After unsuccessfully asking her to turn
the music down, he got so annoyed that he threw a chair at the dressing room wall. As
he dryly observed, this didn't help set the mood for their upcoming love scene. Fortunately,
Jones didn't hold Moore's outburst against him forever. After his death in 2017, she
described him as, quote, "a great gentleman" and declared,
"He will always remain one of my best experiences in my filming career."
There are probably a lot of moments that the actors in the notorious so-bad-it's-good-movie
The Room regret filming. Juliette Danielle, who plays Lisa, brought up one moment in particular
during a Reddit AMA. When she first saw one of the movie's famously long lovemaking scenes,
she was, quote, "mortified." Unbeknownst to her, a rose petal had stuck to her back, and
on the big screen it looks a lot like a scab. And that's not exactly something you'd want
to show off to a theater full of strangers.
Another director might've used a different shot to spare his actress the embarrassment,
but not the eccentric Tommy Wiseau. Danielle admitted that shooting the erotic scenes were
uncomfortable but, quote, "pretty standard." But then she elaborated,
"The only difference is that Tommy used ALL the footage…rather than whittling it down
to a short sequence like most do."
Danielle's not sorry that she appeared in an infamously bad movie, as it's led to other
opportunities, and she's come to terms with being "Lisa from The Room" forever. But she
does regret that she appeared in it without her clothes on.
"YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, LISA!"
Sometimes when actors get caught up in steamy moments, it leads to painful results. During
a 2016 episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, How to Get Away with Murder's Viola Davis admitted
that she and co-star Billy Brown had taken their direction for a love scene a bit too
far. Brown was told to seductively slam Davis up against a wall, and she was up for it.
So she pulled out all the stops, but then she proceeded to throw her back out.
The injury was bad enough that Davis put a temporary hold on the especially intense love
scenes. She also joked with Kimmel that she kept the slightly awkward injury a secret
from her husband, Julius Tennon, who's also an actor. Tennon appeared in one episode of
How to Get Away with Murder, and he even had his own love scene with his wife that resulted
in a different kind of mishap. As it happened, Davis felt so safe and comfortable acting
opposite her husband that she got a little distracted.
"He had to take my panties off at one point."
"I see."
"And then I had to keep resetting them, cause you know you got to keep doing the scene over
and over again."
When you're on a show called Sex and the City, you know you're going to be spending a healthy
portion of your time faking passion. Kristin Davis, who played prim and proper Charlotte,
was usually fine with her character's exploits, but not all the time. During a 2019 appearance
on Watch What Happens Live, she told Andy Cohen about the one love scene she really
hated.
In a season three episode, Charlotte goes to bed with investment banker Alexander Lemley,
a gentleman in the streets and a foul-mouthed shouter in the sheets. Christopher Orr, the
actor who played Lemley, had to yell certain derogatory words in her face during the scene's
climax, which Davis admitted she didn't enjoy one bit.
"I really, really hated it. I hated it. I hated it. I hated it so much!"
And that wasn't the only time the actress had her struggles on the proudly raunchy show.
In particular, there was one scene involving self-love. Davis recalled,
"I wanted to do it, but I was scared. My heart was pounding. I had adrenaline like crazy."
On the bright side, Davis is at least able to take solace in the fact that Charlotte
was nowhere near as shocking as her co-star Kim Cattrall's performance as the lascivious
Samantha.
Considering that the American Pie flicks are all about teenagers humiliating themselves
while trying to satisfy their hormonal urges, you could understand if its actors would want
to disavow them. But Jason Biggs, who played the pie-loving Jim, has said that he doesn't
regret the whole thing, though there is one scene he takes issue with.
In that particular sequence, Jim sets up a webcam to record his classmate Nadia while
she's alone in his bedroom. She changes into her underwear and sets about satisfying her
urges by herself. Jim eventually walks back in and joins her, which leads to one of the
most famous moments of humiliation ever caught on film.
The problem for Biggs isn't any embarrassment he had while filming it, but rather, how the
scene doesn't really stand the test of time. In 2020, he told Buzzfeed,
"It wouldn't get made now and it couldn't get made now. It would be unacceptable what
that represents…The conversation now is totally different now to what it was 20-plus
years ago, so the art that's made surrounding it needs to be totally different."
Shannon Elizabeth, who played Nadia, agrees. In 2019, she told Page Six that she's grateful
to be remembered for the role, but she also noted,
"If this had come out after the #MeToo movement, there would definitely be a problem. I think
that it would have gone down differently."
Etiquette can make or break an acting partnership. Just ask Miles Teller. In 2013, he starred
opposite Shailene Woodley in the teen romantic drama The Spectacular Now. The couple's smooching
scenes earned them a nomination for Best Kiss at the MTV Movie Awards. But it required a
lot of acting on Teller's part to make it look like he was enjoying one of those kisses.
Before their first liplock, Woodley swallowed, quote, "Chinese dirt supplements." According
to Teller, they tasted exactly how they sound.
But while he may not have enjoyed the kissing, he at least apparently got along with Woodley
otherwise. The pair went on to star together in the Divergent trilogy and were often pictured
hanging out with each other at fancy Hollywood events. In a 2014 Vanity Fair profile of Woodley,
Teller was quoted as saying,
"She's just like a positive energy force that's very infectious."
Woodley has compared their relationship to other famous platonic friendships, like those
between Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, and Julia Roberts and George Clooney. But
despite their closeness, they probably won't be locking lips again anytime soon.
"Guys, we're built to survive."
Salma Hayek fought for years to tell Mexican painter Frida Kahlo's story on the big screen.
So she was overjoyed when Harvey Weinstein's studio Miramax agreed to fund the project,
with Hayek starring and producing. But the experience was far from a happy one.
In a 2017 New York Times op-ed, Hayek claimed that Weinstein harassed her and became enraged
when she turned down his advances. After it became clear that she wouldn't give in to
his demands, he tried to destroy her movie.
"I knew it was a challenge that was given to me so that I would fail."
According to Hayek, Weinstein told her five weeks into filming Frida that she had to appear
in a love scene with another actress, or he would cancel the film. Hayek felt that she'd
exhausted all other options, so she shot the scene, but it took a mental toll on her. On
the day of shooting, she had what she describes as a nervous breakdown. As she put it,
"My body began to shake uncontrollably, my breath was short and I began to cry and cry,
unable to stop, as if I were throwing up tears."
The problem wasn't that she was uncomfortable being intimate with another woman, it was
that she felt forced into it. A spokesperson for Weinstein denied Hayek's version of events,
but this was far from the only allegation of this nature he's been accused of.
Anna Kendrick is known for speaking her mind, and she doesn't hold back when she's talking
about love scenes with her co-stars, except when it comes to naming names. In her memoir
Scrappy Little Nobody, Kendrick admitted that sometimes, how she feels about her castmates
affects her enthusiasm for intimate scenes. For example, she once argued with a director
over kissing an actor who was playing her boyfriend. As she put it,
"I felt like there was simply no motivation for them to kiss in that moment."
The director explained that they were meant to be a happy couple, which involved kissing.
So they kissed, but Kendrick wasn't happy about it. As for what co-star she's talking
about, there are at least two who can be ruled out. She's described kissing Chris Pine in
Into the Woods as, quote, "cinnamon in a meadow." And she has no regrets over the smooch she
shared with Blake Lively in A Simple Favor, though it did require some choreography between
the two actresses. As she told Pride Source,
"I remember Blake and I both feeling like neither of us wanted to be the aggressor.
We definitely struggled to find that perfect balance of, there’s just this moment and
they both get caught up in it and it’s a little uncomfortable."
The first time that many American moviegoers met Margot Robbie was in 2013's white-collar
crime flick The Wolf of Wall Street. The film required her to perform several love scenes
with Leonardo DiCaprio, but there was one that left a mark, literally, as it involved
rolling around in piles of fake money. As she explained to The Daily Beast,
"I got a million paper cuts on my back from all that money!"
Then the crew told her,
"You look like you’ve been whipped a million times. Your back is covered in a thousand
red scratches."
There was another love scene that posed some different challenges. It takes place in a
nursery, and while shooting it, Robbie had to perform her moves and lines in front of
an all-male crew for 17 hours in a very cramped bedroom. She told Net-a-Porter,
"It’s just a very weird thing and you have to bury the embarrassment and absurdity, really
deep, and fully commit."
Just stay away from that fake money!
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