Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan in Fifty Shades of Gray
Imagine for a moment that you are an actress at the beginning of your career. Your stage performances have been acclaimed — your Ophelia has been the talk of the National Theater and your Chekhov interpretations have been described as «breathtaking» — and your agents and manager are now keen for you to make the leap into film.
This suits you quite well, and you dream of greater openness. But to your somewhat dismay, after successfully impressing the director and producer of a new romantic comedy, you are wheeled into a room where a line of significantly older and more famous actors awaits you. You are then emphatically encouraged to kiss each of them in front of half-interested prying eyes to see if you click. This, for the uninitiated, is a “chemical test”.
The unpleasant and often humiliating ritual that actors (of both sexes, but predominantly women) have to undergo for years has always been in the spotlight, but none other than Anne Hathaway has come forward to discuss it gloom, in a recent interview with V. Magazine to promote her new romantic comedy «The Idea of You.»
Anne Hathaway in Los Angeles, February 2024. Photo: Getty
To great resonance, she said that during her performance Two decades ago she would have had to kiss actors all day. In her words: «Back in the 2000s — and this actually happened to me — it was considered normal to ask an actor to kiss other actors to test chemistry, which is actually the worst way to do it.»
She hated the experience, saying: «I was told, 'We've got 10 guys coming in today and you're the one chosen.' Don’t you want to kiss all of them?” And I thought, «Is there something wrong with me?» because I wasn't thrilled. I thought it sounded rude.
“It wasn’t a power play, no one was trying to be horrible or hurt me,” she continued. “It was a very different time and we know better now.” However, Hathaway now realizes that if she had pulled out, it could easily have been the end of her mainstream career. As she admitted: “I was so young and well aware of how easy it was to lose everything if I was labeled as difficult, so I just pretended to be excited and carried on.”
Since then, Hathaway has had an illustrious career that has included everything from Oscar-winning fame in Les Miserables to working with acclaimed directors like Ang Lee, Nolan and James Gray, as well as a welcome dearth of typical Hollywood rom-coms. on her resume, which required her to look charmingly at her leading men and kiss them passionately.
However, her comments have reignited debate about the chemistry test in Hollywood, which used to be standard practice but which Hathaway now suggests has disappeared. The industry now has «intimacy coordinators» who carefully monitor the coordination of a love scene to ensure there are no complaints of exploitation, but lately the priority has been to see whether on-screen couples might fall into conflict. love each other convincingly. Some producers and directors were willing to go to any lengths to achieve this.
Admittedly, few have gone as far as Robert Evans, who Sharon Stone recently revealed advised her to sleep with her co-star William Baldwin during the filming of the erotic thriller Sliver to improve their chemistry. She said Evans told her, «I should sleep with Billy Baldwin, because if I sleep with Billy Baldwin, Billy Baldwin's performance will be better, and we need Billy to be better in the movie, because that was the problem.» .
Billy Baldwin and Sharon Stone in the movie “Sliver” Photo: Alamy
Stone, then at the height of her commercial power thanks to the recent success of Basic Instinct, flatly refused to support the idea and later described Evans as «one of the strangest people I've ever met in the movie business, and one of the most inappropriate.»
Evans himself bragged to Stone, while trying to convince her to do this particular exercise in method acting, that he slept with Ava Gardner to achieve the level of acting he needed, appearing opposite her in Hemingway's 1957 adaptation of The Sun Also Rises. He was certainly a prolific husband: He married seven times during his life, and his most famous relationship was with actress Ali MacGraw, whom he cast in a supreme act of trust (or nepotism) in the film Love Story. which was produced by Paramount: the studio he ran at the time. He was repaid by making the film a hit.
There was no off-screen romance between McGraw and Ryan O'Neal, the film's star, although she kissed him so hard at the screen test that O'Neal was sure he had a job and wondered if there was something… then between them, only to be dissuaded when a mutual friend told him that McGraw had kissed everyone so hard.
Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw in the movie «Love Story» Photo credit: Alami
However, a couple of years later, a different kind of love blossomed between her and Steve McQueen when they appeared in Walter Hill's crime thriller The Getaway; Ironically, she was reluctant to take on the role, but Evans pressured her, saying it would be good for her career. He later regretted not listening to his wife. “Ali warned me, ‘I’m a hot lady. Never leave me for more than two weeks,” he said. The marriage failed and she subsequently married a colleague instead, leading to a lifetime of regrets on Evans' part.
But all these meetings were, at least, by mutual consent, and Stone was able to refuse the persuasion of her producer. However, before Evans began his career in earnest, the rigors of Hollywood casting meant that instead of leading men and women auditioning to see if they could convincingly fall in love with each other, moguls simply cast their favorite starlets. and signed a contract with them. They were then placed opposite whichever actor the studio also preferred.
This led to extremely dark behavior that amounted to, at a minimum, sexual abuse and exploitation—often much worse. The notorious Louis B. Mayer, co-founder of MGM Studios, wielded such power in Hollywood that he backed up his career-destroying threats with action; When actress Jean Howard, the object of his advances, not only rejected them but also married agent Charles K. Feldman, Mayer ensured that not only was Feldman banned from MGM premises, but that his clients were also banned from his productions.
Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis in the movie «Some Like It Hot»
Yet here was a man who held meetings with a teenage Judy Garland sitting on his lap, groping her almost absentmindedly as he pressed for this or that big money deal. As Hollywood historian and writer Carl Beauchamp put it: «Mayer believed that he had built his studio brick by brick, it was his city, and he was the king, so he deserved all the privileges of the kingdom.»
Many of the victims of this type of abuse are left with permanent scars. Marilyn Monroe, a renowned casting veteran, later wrote about studio executives in her memoir, My Story: “I met them all. Falsity and failures haunted them everywhere. Some were vicious and dishonest. But they were as close to the movies as possible. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and plans. And you saw Hollywood through their eyes — a crowded brothel, a carousel with horse beds.»
Perhaps it was because of the consequences of this mistreatment that Monroe, despite all her undoubted beauty and glamor, often had frosty relationships with her co-stars. The tremor that happened between her and Laurence Olivier on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl later inspired the film My Week with Marilyn, and her Some Like It Hot co-star Tony Curtis famously (and ungallantly) wrote with her love scenes. like “how to kiss Hitler.” He also later claimed that he had a romantic affair with her, which he called «unforgettable»; Since Monroe had long since died, there was no way to confirm or deny his claims, but the on-screen chemistry between the two actors remains one of cinema's greatest comic moments.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in the movie «Mr. & Mrs. Smith
This is more than can be said for many other duos where chemical tests were either never performed or turned out to be faulty. Although Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's fiery chemistry both on- and off-screen during the filming of Mr. and Mrs. Smith led to the Brangelina phenomenon, lightning didn't strike twice while Jolie was filming Johnny Depp's comedy thriller The Tourist. The resulting awkwardness between them will undermine the film's credibility.
However, there have been even darker examples of mismatched couples, such as Julia Roberts calling her co-star Nick Nolte in the forgotten romantic comedy I Love Trouble «absolutely disgusting» (he responded that «[she's] not a good person, everyone knows it» ) or Sophia Loren attacking Marlon Brando for groping her on the set of A Countess for Hong Kong, after which she said: “He never did it again, but after that he was very difficult to work with.”
Sometimes, of course, off-screen quarrels can lead to strained relationships on screen. Debra Winger and Richard Gere made a fiery couple in the beloved romantic drama An Officer and a Gentleman, but when the cameras were off, there was no love between them; Winger said being with Gere was «like talking to a brick wall,» although she also admitted that «we had bad people running the show, and it kind of polluted the water.»
And even if Patrick Swayze's romance with Jennifer Gray in Dirty Dancing made it one of the most popular films of the eighties, Swayze tried to cope with his co-star, writing about her in his memoirs: “She would fall into stupid moods, forcing us again and filming scenes again. She seemed especially emotional, sometimes crying if someone criticized her.»
Tension, when used correctly by a skilled director, can even bring out the best in a situation rather than the worst. Sean Young and Harrison Ford famously hated each other on the set of Blade Runner, and their love scene was called a «hate scene» by those working on set, but Ridley Scott was able to turn this to the film's advantage by creating more great atmosphere. a layer of ambiguity regarding which characters were supposedly emotionless replicants and which were human.
By the time Young was digitally revived for her reappearance in the sequel Blade Runner 2049, the expression of mixed surprise and horror with which Ford's character greeted her on screen could either be attributed to his acting skills, the actor, or a memory about what happened between them three and a half decades earlier.
Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in the movie «Twilight: New Moon»
The recent relationship experiences between the actors have also not been pleasant. When Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson first auditioned for the Twilight saga, they met in the bedroom of director Catherine Hardwicke's home and were asked to try out one of the script's countless love scenes, which Pattinson did his best to do. Hardwicke recalls: “They were filming a kissing scene and he fell and landed right on this floor. Rob got so into it that he fell out of bed. I was like, “Dude, calm down.”
An additional problem was that, whatever the circumstances of their audition, Stewart was still underage. As Hardwick said, «I thought, 'Oh my God, Kristen was 17, I don't want to get involved in anything illegal.' So I remember I said to Rob, «By the way, Kristen is 17. It's illegal for them to have sex in our country.» And he was like, “Okay, okay.” her romance with Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders.
Similarly, while the Fifty Shades of Gray series was widely criticized for the apparent lack of chemistry between its stars Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, a meeting between Charlie Hunnam and Johnson from the original cast, inspired by the original film's characters, was directed by Sam Taylor. Johnson sounds downright sickening. After previous actresses who auditioned for Hunnam (and he had to «kiss and cuddle» them) were deemed too passive, a much more intimate audition was staged in a Los Angeles hotel room, in which Taylor was said to Johnson pushed the couple to their limits “in every way.”
No matter what happened in the hotel room, Johnson managed to get the role. Hunnam, however, subsequently dropped out, citing «something like a nervous breakdown.» It's not hard to imagine that something went wrong on this particular chemistry test.
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