When you step back and think about it, acting is actually quite a strange profession. Your job is to basically live inside someone else's skin for hours or days at a time, and convince anybody watching that you're a completely different person. You're essentially being paid to lie to people!
There's a lot that goes into giving a convincing performance as an actor. You might be required to speak in a language or accent that isn't your own, for example. More intimately, you might be asked to kiss someone you'd never normally dream of kissing, and pretending to like it.
Even for the best actors in the world, the 'pretending to like it' part isn't always possible. You might not like your co-star. Your co-star might have terrible hygiene. There might be ethical issues to consider. Every star on this list said 'no' to kissing in front of the cameras!
Of all the types of performer who might refuse an on-camera kiss, musicians make the most sense to us. They're not really actors - they're just occasionally required to act for the sake of a music video. Leona Lewis was asked to kiss Chace Crawford of 'Gossip Girl' fame when she was filming the video for 'I Will Be,' but Lewis had other ideas.
At the time of filming, Lewis had a boyfriend. As she didn't consider herself to be an actor - or have any aspirations of becoming one - she felt it inappropriate to put herself in a lip lock with Crawford. She considered it to be cheating, and asked the director to think of another way around it. Lewis must be a woman of considerable willpower - we can think of many people who'd give anything for a moment of passion with Crawford, and some of them are married!
For those people who have deeply-held religious or moral convictions, getting into the acting profession can be a troubling experience. Even though you might be playing a character, it's ultimately still you who has to perform any physical activity required of you, and sometimes that can lead to compromising your morals. For Fawad Khan, he found he couldn't go through with it when he was asked to kiss his co-star Alia Bhatt in 'Kapoor & Sons.'
Khan considered his own chastity more important to him than the part - or his job - and so he point blank refused to do it. The director tried as hard as possible to film around the problem by shooting from an angle which obscured the kiss. Khan and Bhatt therefore performed a simulated kiss, in which no physical contact was made. Despite that, Bhatt says that Khan was still nervous every time she leaned forward in case she tried to plant one on him.
The most compelling aspect of the sitcom 'Martin' was the relationship between Martin, who was 'played' (if you can call it that) by Martin Lawrence, and Gina, played by Tisha Campbell. The characters were the backbone of the show, and the audience watching spent years convinced that Campbell and Lawrence were genuinely interested in each other. That's until Campbell spoke out - and eventually walked out.
According to Campbell, Lawrence had a romantic interest in her, which she didn't reciprocate. She claims e then tried to force kisses on her, and also touched her inappropriately while filming. Campbell initially refused to kiss Lawrence, but eventually quit the show completely, and the show was canceled as a result. Whatever went on behind the scenes, it seems it's dealt with now - both actors have signed on for the planned reboot of the show.
Neal McDonough is one of those actors that you know very well by face, but not by name. He turns up everywhere in film and television without ever seeming to get star billing. Now you've seen his face again here, try to remember his name! McDonough's success in acting is all the more remarkable when you consider that he has a major limitation - he absolutely refuses to kiss anybody, ever, other than his wife. He's convinced that doing so would be contrary to his Christian faith.
At one point, McDonough was cast in 'Scoundrels,' and was having a pretty good time with it until he found out he was scheduled to do a love scene with Virginia Madsen. McDonough refused. It was nothing against Madsen in particular; he just wouldn't have done it with anyone. In the end, McDonough was fired from the show, with David James Elliott filling his shoes.
A few years ago, Kirk Cameron would have had no problem with kissing Erin Bethea on the set of 'Fireproof,' nor any other woman on any other film set. Cameron has performed plenty of on-screen kisses in his younger year, and he's done so with glee. All of that has changed now, because he's found two things in his life. Firstly, he's found a wife, and secondly, he's found God. Because of a combination of the two, he can no longer kiss other people.
Luckily, Cameron's wife is also an actor - she's Chelsea Noble, who starred with him in 'Growing Pains.' When the script of 'Fireproof' called for him to kiss Bethea's character, they simply brought Noble in, put her in Bethea's clothes, and shot the kissing scene from behind so nobody could tell the difference. We have to tip our hat to the director for that idea - it's a novel way around the problem.
Like Leona Lewis, Janet Jackson is a musician first and foremost. Unlike Lewis, Jackson has shown an active interest in acting, and has a number of television and film roles to her name. You'd have thought that would mean that she was open to the idea of kissing people while in character, but apparently not. She did eventually agree to kiss Tupac Shakur while filming 'Poetic Justice,' but it took a lot of persuasion.
Although Shakur and Jackson sizzled on screen together, it sounds like Shakur found her hard to work with. She's heard rumors that Shakur was something of a 'player,' and so tried to insist that he was tested for AIDS before kissing her - which suggests Jackson's understanding of how the illness is transmitted could use some work! A deeply offended Shakur refused. Jackson eventually kissed him anyway. We doubt they spoke much afterward.
While making 'Scary Movie 5' together, Lindsay Lohan refused to kiss Charlie Sheen because she was 'concerned about his lifestyle choices.' Hello pot, meet kettle. As with Janet Jackson years earlier, it would seem that Lohan had misapprehensions about how certain diseases can or cannot be transmitted between people. In fairness to Lohan, she told the producers she didn't want to do any kissing scenes with Sheen when she accepted the role, so they left the scenes in the script despite knowing she wouldn't do them. That's on them, not her.
If you've seen the movie (and if so, you have our sympathies), you might recall thinking you saw Sheen and Lohan kiss. You didn't. That was a body double for Lohan who performed the scene for her. Although it would have been easy for Sheen to be offended by all of this, apparently, he wasn't. He's very much aware of his reputation.
We've already seen a few different reasons why someone might refuse to kiss a co-star, but this is a new one for our list. Will Smith refused a kissing scene in 'Six Degrees of Separation' - because it was with another man. Smith is heterosexual, but agreed to accept the part of a homosexual con artist, so he should really have seen this problem coming. Being blindsided by an unexpected kissing scene is one thing. Refusing to perform a gay kiss when you've agreed to play the role of a gay man is quite another.
The director was apparently furious about Smith's refusal, but had shot too much of the film by that point to replace Smith, so shot a 'simulated' kiss instead. For his part, Smith partially blamed his decision on bad advice he'd received from Denzel Washington, and also his own 'immaturity' at the time he made the movie. He says if he'd had the chance again, he'd have filmed the scene as intended.
Kevin Hart's attitude towards kissing men on screen is a little confusing. We've all seen him kiss Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson during 'Central Intelligence,' but he was apparently making an exception for that. Hart says he's been offered numerous other roles where kissing a man would have been part of the deal, and he's turned them all down. That's within his rights, and in our eyes, it's a more honest decision than the one Will Smith made in 'Six Degrees of Separation.'
Hart has been keen to point out that he has no issue with the LGBTQ community; he just wouldn't feel comfortable filming gay scenes, as he doesn't believe he'd be able to commit to the part convincingly. His awkwardness led to him turning down a role in 'Tropic Thunder' which had been written especially for him, because it would have involved filming gay scenes. Hart blames his own 'insecurities' for his reluctance.
We don't know for certain, but if we had to guess, we'd say that at some point in the recent past, Bollywood star Sunny Leone has performed a kissing scene with an actor who had really bad breath. We say that, because she used to do kissing scenes all the time. Ever since she made 'Ragini MMS 2' back in 2014, she's refused to do any at all. In fact, she feels so strongly about it that she has a 'no kissing' rule specifically written into all of her contracts, so directors don't try to force her into it.
The most curious thing about this is that Leone is primarily an 'adult' actress. That means she films a lot of scenes in which she's wearing very little, and goes far further than just kissing her on-screen partners. She has no issue with doing full-on love scenes in movies like 'One Night Stand' so long as she doesn't have to kiss her partner. Perhaps she just feels that kissing makes the scene too intimate?
Reese Witherspoon has played so many 'love interest' roles that it's hard to believe she'd ever refuse to kiss a co-star, but there were exceptional circumstances on the set of 'Water for Elephants.' Her co-star was Robert Pattinson - which for the majority of women would be considered to be a bonus - but unfortunately for Pattinson, Witherspoon, and the whole production, Pattinson was trying to deal with a heavy cold at the time the scene was due to be filmed. Witherspoon wasn't keen on catching it!
A sympathetic Witherspoon later commended Pattinson for continuing to film while so ill, but also said that he had the most 'disgusting, green, infectious' cold she'd ever seen in her life. Pattinson felt wretched about the whole thing, and apologized to Witherspoon between bouts of sneezing and snotting. Nevertheless, they eventually decided the movie had to have the kiss, and so they went ahead with the scene. We'll go ahead and assume there were no tongues involved.
Being asked to kiss Cate Blanchett while making 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' wouldn't normally have been an issue for Brad Pitt - who's had romantic scenes in just about every movie he's ever appeared in. The problem was that the movie came during an awkward point in his marriage to Angelina Jolie. Pitt hadn't indicated any issue with the scenes until the day they were due to take place, and David Fincher, the film's director, was left stunned and scratching his head.
Pitt's initial reasoning was that he wanted to 'respect his wife,' even though they'd met on the set of a movie that involved kissing scenes. He ultimately relented after speaking at length with both Fincher and Blanchett, and went ahead with the scene exactly as it was described in the script. Not long afterward, it was confirmed that Pitt and Jolie had separated.
This is one of the most notorious cases of a kiss being refused in the history of Hollywood. Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte were cast as a pair of star-crossed lovers in 'I Love Trouble,' but the only thing they were crossing on set was swords. They got off on a bad foot on day one, and their relationship deteriorated from there. In the years since, Nolte has said that Roberts is 'not a nice person,' whereas she describes him as 'completely disgusting.'
Given that the two lead actors in the film openly hated each other, the question of persuading them to kiss wasn't an easy one to solve. Eventually, they did - in the most limp, awkward, and unconvincing way imaginable. The scene, like the film, was a complete flop. You can't make a romantic drama when there's palpably no romance between the two people who are supposed to be in love.
It seems that finding strong religious convictions later on in life is a recurring theme within the Cameron household. Like her brother Kirk, Candace Cameron had no issue with filming kissing or love scenes when she was a little younger. Also like her brother Kirk, she's now heavily against the idea - although she hasn't quite gone as far as him with her reluctance to perform.
Cameron will still kiss co-stars if she absolutely has to, but has been vocal about never enjoying it, and will also resist any attempt to make her (or her character) film any scene which goes further than kissing. That makes her current line of work - in which she mostly appears in romantic films on the Hallmark channel - a strange choice. Part of the issue is that her husband feels so uncomfortable about her kissing other people that he won't watch any of her work.
This story is actually quite cute, in a way! Kirsten Dunst is a fully-grown adult woman now, and has kissed many people in many films, but she was famous long before she was old enough to have romantic feelings for anybody. When girls are a certain age, all boys are icky and disgusting - even if that boy is Brad Pitt, and he's the poster star on your friends' bedroom walls.
Dunst was only eleven when she was required to kiss the adult Pitt on the set of 'Interview with The Vampire' (if you haven't seen the film, we promise it's not as gross as it sounds). While most girls her age would have been thrilled, Dunst thought it was 'disgusting,' and says she didn't kiss anybody else on or off screen until she was sixteen. Looking back, it was a strange thing to be asked to do. Surely the director could have thought of a way around it, as we've seen in other films?
We've already heard about Julia Roberts refusing to kiss a co-star - now we have someone refusing to kiss Julia Roberts! Denzel Washington was the man who said 'no,' but it wasn't down to anything personal he felt about Roberts. The two were making 'The Pelican Brief' together, and Washington felt that the love scenes didn't add anything to the film.
Aside from their irrelevance to the plot, Washington was also of the opinion that the narrative of a black man falling in love with a white woman was overdone in the movies of the time, and that not enough black women were being allowed to play romantic parts. Going further, he said a lot of his fans were black women, and they'd have been upset if he'd agreed to go ahead with the scenes. Roberts was a little disappointed - saying that she'd have loved to kiss Washington because she 'has a pulse' - but understood his reasoning.
We have a feeling that there might be more to this story than we're being told. When Vanessa Hudgens wanted to shake off her 'Disney' image, she took a part in 'Spring Breakers' precisely because it would call for love scenes and other adult content, thus divorcing herself from the squeaky-clean image of her past. It sounds like something went wrong on set, and she didn't enjoy it.
Hudgens' character got down and dirty with James Franco's in the script, and Hudgens found the experience both nerve-wracking and stressful, to the point where she told her agent to reject any offer that required her to shoot similar scenes. If it was just a case of feeling awkward, then that's fair enough, but she's also enigmatically said that she'd rather 'kiss a girl' than kiss Franco again. It sounds like the issue might be more with him than with the scene.
Liam Hemsworth, also known as Mr. Miley Cyrus, hated every second of shooting intimate scenes with Jennifer Lawrence while they made 'Mockingjay.' Lawrence is routinely voted as one of the most beautiful and desirable women in the world, and 'Mockingjay' was long before he and Cyrus got married, so what could the issue possibly have been?
As it turns out, Lawrence and Hemsworth are close friends and have been for years, and so kissing someone he was close to on a platonic level felt weird to him. Also, it seems that Lawrence has a love of pranks. Every time they were due to perform a kissing scene, Lawrence would make a point of eating garlic, tuna, or something equally smelly - and then not cleaning her teeth. She wouldn't tell Hemsworth until the moment before filming started. He didn't enjoy the surprise!
Making 'The Lyon's Den' didn't exactly work out as planned for Rob Lowe. Lowe was a big fan of Jewel, and had pushed hard for her to be cast as his love interest. He got his wish, but on balance he probably wishes that he hasn't. She really didn't want to kiss him at all, and tried as hard as possible to get out of it. She even brought her boyfriend onto the set with her on the days where the scenes were supposed to be shot!
At one point Jewel asked for the scenes to be removed altogether, but eventually went ahead with just one kiss - which came across as awkward and reluctant. Lowe would later tell Ellen DeGeneres that making the show was a series of 'indignities,' of which Jewel point-blank refusing to do the one thing she'd been hired for was the worst. Jewel later appeared on a comedy roast of Lowe, saying she refused because she 'didn't know where his mouth had been.' Ouch.
Until she made 'The Get Down,' Herizen F. Guardiola was almost a complete unknown. Had she not forced herself to go through with a kiss scene with Justice Smith, she may still be an unknown. Making the film strapped a rocket to her back, but she apparently hadn't read the whole script before agreeing to the part.
Guardiola has never publicly commented on the kiss scene, but Smith has been happy to explain how awkward she made things for him! He was ready to do the scene when apparently Guardiola turned to director Baz Luhrmann and said 'I don't want to kiss him, I don't know him' - in the process apparently forgetting what 'acting' means. Smith was caught completely off guard, and confesses that for a short while it also made it weird for him to think about kissing people in films. He's gotten over the issue now - as, it seems, has Guardiola.
Priyanka Chopra is best known to western audiences for being married to Nick Jonas, but in her home country she's a huge movie star, and a big name on the 'Bollywood' scene. She's made plenty of smash hit Indian films, including 'Saat Khoon Maaf,' which also starred fellow Bollywood legend, Annu Kapoor. Reading between the lines, it would seem that the two of them didn't get along.
Kapoor's character was one of Chopra's seven husbands in the movie, and so she was asked to kiss him and film other romantic scenes. Kapoor says Chopra refused, citing the fact that he was almost three decades older than her. Chopra denies the accusation that she refused to kiss him - she simply insists that there was never any such scene in the script - but she did say that if she had to choose any of her seven husbands to die, he would have been the one to go. How lovely!
Thandie Newton is a very beautiful woman. Gerard Butler is a very beautiful man. Both of them have shown on multiple occasions that they have no problem with a script that calls for them to do love scenes - so why wasn't there one in 'RocknRolla' when they starred together? The two stars got along fine - this was actually a repeat of the situation with Reece Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson.
On the day the (very intimate) love scene was supposed to be filmed, Butler was 'literally dripping' with a cold, and Newton didn't want any part of it. Saying that Butler was 'very unwell indeed,' Newton says she went to director Guy Ritchie and told him he was going to have to think of something else, because she wouldn't kiss him. Ritchie somehow managed to pull it out of the bag with some clever camerawork.
Samuel L. Jackson has been in a lot of films. We mean seriously loads. Sometimes, he turns up so often that you suspect he just says 'yes' to everything without bothering to read the script. There might be something to that theory, because he cited his own ignorance as to the reason he wouldn't do any kissing scenes in the movie 'Cell,' which is based on a Stephen King novel.
Despite agreeing to be in the film (and be paid for doing a professional job), Jackson later admitted that he didn't bother to read the novel or even the script. As such, the news that his character was gay came as a complete surprise to him when he turned up on set. He didn't pull out, but he did refuse to kiss any other men - even though doing so was fairly vital to his character. It might have been easier for the production just to let him go and find someone else; 'Cell' didn't turn out great in the end.
There's some debate about this one, and Justin Bieber's representatives have never confirmed or denied the rumors either way, so we'll leave this one up to you to decide. At one point, it was reported that Bieber was being lined up to star in a movie called 'Uber Girl.' This was somewhere around 2016, and nobody's even been able to independently verify that such a film ever even existed. If it did or does, it's yet to make it all the way to a full production.
Despite the shadowy nature of the alleged film, many mainstream media outlets said that Bieber had been offered a part in the film as a Canadian pop star (so it shouldn't have been a major stretch for him), but ultimately declined because his character would have been gay, and would also have been required to shoot love scenes. As Bieber is neither a) an actor or b) gay, you have to wonder why anyone would have considered him for the part in the first place.
There's still some controversy about this one. What we can say for certain - because both sides have confirmed it - is that Luke Grimes walked away from 'True Blood' at around the same time that he found out his character was due to have a same-sex relationship with another character played by Nelsan Ellis. What the parties disagree on is why that happened.
Grimes says that it was all down to a schedule conflict, and that a movie part he'd accepted meant he could no longer commit to 'True Blood.' Nelsan says that Grimes never said anything about any movie parts until he found out his character was going to be involved in gay scenes, and then the 'movie role' appeared out of nowhere. Nelsan was less than impressed by Grimes' attitude, and says that he can't understand why anyone would give up a job that paid big money just because they couldn't stomach a few gay kisses.
This is what happens when you mix business with pleasure. Once upon a time, Bollywood stars Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif were a real-life couple, and everything between them was happy and rosy. Then, they broke up. Everybody in Bollywood knew they had broken, up, but that didn't stop the producers of 'Jagga Jasoos' to cast them as romantic partners together. That was a questionable decision - and it didn't go very well for them.
Both Kapoor and Kaif agreed to play the parts, and turned up for work, but allegedly wouldn't exchange a word between each other unless required to do so on camera. The script called for the two to kiss, but Kapoor apparently told the director that it was out of the question, and he wasn't going to do it. We can't decide who's more at fault here - the casting director for choosing them to play the roles, or the two actors for agreeing to do it. Actually, seeing as Kaif was willing to perform the kiss, we're going to have to blame Kapoor.
Alyson Hannigan kissed Jason Segel a lot while making 'How I Met Your Mother,' but not very much in their early days on set together. Hannigan doesn't have a problem with kissing, or with Segel, but she didn't like the fact that he was a smoker. Segel apparently wanted to give up, so Hannigan thought she'd help him by refusing to kiss him until he'd done so.
It wasn't just the filming impracticalities that acted as an incentive for Segel; he also agreed to pay Hannigan $10 every time he went out for a cigarette, in the hope that he'd eventually get sick of losing his money, and quit for good! With Hannigan's (good-natured) assistance - by which we mean she was on his back all the time - he eventually succeeded. From that point on, their characters were much more romantic together on screen.
What happened between Pat Boone and Shirley Jones in 'April Love' is another case of 'he said, she said' that we'll likely never get to the bottom of. What both sides agree on is that it was Boone who refused to kiss Jones. What they disagree on are the reasons why. According to Boone, he'd simply never had a love scene in a movie before, and had never talked to his wife about what he should do if one came up. According to him, there was no 'kiss scene' between him and Jones in 'April Love' until the director tried to include one.
Jones tells a different story. She says the kiss scene was always in the script, and Boone would have known that when he took the part. She also took issue with the fact that Boone kissed his co-star in the very next film he made, which left her feeling personally slighted. His refusal never made sense to her - he tried to tell Jones the same story he'd given to the movie's director, but she couldn't understand how he could reconcile such a position with the fact that he was an actor.
We're including Dobrev and Somerhalder together, because theirs was a mutual decision. The pair are a former real-life couple - a case of life imitating art as their 'Vampire Diaries' characters were also in a relationship. Dobrev and Somerhalder couldn't make their love last, although they remain good friends. It did make kissing feel strange after their break-up, though, and so they pushed back against any such scenes in the show going forward from that point.
Their decision did take some of the heat out of the Damon-Elena relationship on the show, although their decision to opt-out wasn't absolute. In the very final episode of the show - when the moment called for it the most - they agreed to do one final kiss. Fans of the show - who knew of the drama behind the scenes - appreciated them for it.
Sadie Sink wasn't happy with the idea of kissing Caleb McLaughlin during 'Stranger Things,' but if she hadn't kicked up such a fuss about the idea of doing so, it would probably never have happened. Ross Duffer, who co-created the show, was joking around with Sink by telling her that he was going to have her and McLaughlin kiss at the Snow Ball. At the time, he had no intention of doing so. He was so amused by Sink's reaction that he decided to go ahead and include the scene.
While Sink went ahead and did it like a professional, we do have questions about how appropriate this was. It would be one thing for a director to prank an adult actor like this, but both Sink and McLaughlin were only fifteen when the scenes were shot. There's a line between pranking and bullying, and we can't help but feel that this little stunt might have crossed it.
Sunny Leone isn't the only star of Bollywood who won't kiss co-stars; male performer Tiger Shroff feels equally strongly about the matter. Shroff is one of the biggest stars of Bollywood, and is considered to be both an action movie hero and a heart-throb. Think of him as Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt all rolled into one! Shroff had performed kissing scenes early on in his career, but he'd only made five movies before he met girlfriend Disha Patani. From that point onward, he's refused to kiss anyone else.
Oddly, Shroff now feels that on-screen kisses go against the culture of Indian society in general, even though he's performed them in the past. Some critics think that he's just trying to mark himself out as being different from his father Jackie Shroff, who is known as something of an eccentric in India. It would seem that Shroff would prefer to be seen as a more conservative actor.
Jennifer Lawrence is back on our list - but this time she's not grossing out Liam Hemsworth with tuna and garlic before they kiss. In fact, if Lawrence and Hemsworth were ever required to kiss again, she'd likely have difficulty with the scene because he's married. That was her rationale with finding it hard to kiss Chris Pratt when they were making 'Passengers' together. Luckily, the always-inventive Lawrence had a solution to the problem.
Lawrence's moral issues with the kiss were twofold - Pratt was married to Anna Faris when the movie was made, and both Faris and Pratt were good friends of hers. In short, she felt like she was kissing her friend's husband, and couldn't shake off the feeling. Eventually, she decided to get extremely drunk before shooting the scene, which did the trick. Now we know she's so skilled as an actor she can also convincingly play a sober person while she's wasted!
It doesn't sound like the set of the original 'Blade Runner' was much fun to be on. Rutger Hauer kept improvising the script, the constant simulated rain made everybody wet and miserable, director Ridley Scott's obsessiveness with getting every shot 'perfect' was driving people to despair, and Sean Young and Harrison Ford couldn't stand each other. It sounds like the issue was mostly on Young's side.
According to people who worked on the production, Young complained to Scott that Ford's facial hair was 'tearing her face up' when they kissed - which, looking at Ford's face during the scenes, seems unlikely. That irritated Ford, and so every kissing scene from then on was fraught and difficult. Their major love scene was nicknamed 'the hate scene' by the movie's crew, because everyone involved in filming it knew that neither actor wanted to do it.
This one is almost unforgivable. When someone made the decision to make a movie out of '50 Shades of Grey,' all they had to do was pick a pair of lead actors who had intense, sizzling chemistry together. Turning this book into a movie was all about getting that chemistry right (because let's be honest - there's nothing else to the source material!). There should have been enough time to audition potential actors together and make sure they got a great pairing. According to Jamie Dornan - who landed the lead role as Christian Grey - they didn't manage that.
Although he didn't ascribe any blame directly to either himself or his co-star Dakota Johnson, Dornan says they didn't have any natural chemistry at all. He also said that shooting together with her was 'very uncomfortable.' There's no further detail available, but the general impression is that they just didn't get along. The producers had one job here, and they failed to do it.
Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio have kissed in the past. They've done it a lot. Winslet and DiCaprio kissing was more-or-less the backbone of 'Titanic,' which was one of the biggest films of the 1990s. When they were cast together again in 'Revolutionary Road' over a decade later, they refused to kiss, or perform any romantic scenes at all. There are a few reasons why, and none of them have anything to do with not liking each other.
The biggest thing that stopped Winslet from kissing DiCaprio is that her husband Sam Mendes was sat in the director's chair for the film, and she didn't feel like she was able to kiss someone she was so famously connected with in the past while her husband was sat in a chair a few feet away. DiCaprio wasn't offended by her decision; he felt that kissing scenes between himself and Winslet would have reminded the audience of 'Titanic' too much, when he'd rather they were focused in on the newer movie. Everyone was happy - except, perhaps, the audience.
We're not saying there's anything specifically wrong with James Franco - but we do now have two cases of well-known actors refusing to kiss him on movie sets. Again, though, we're being told that there was no personal issue between Sienna Miller and Franco that prevented the kissing scenes in 'Camille' from being shot - she was just having a really bad time with her teeth while the movie was being made.
The lack of intimacy between Miller and Franco definitely hurt the film - they were cast as newlyweds, and therefore they should have been much more romantic with each other - but according to Miller's account, the problem couldn't be helped. Her dental issues became so pronounced that an emergency dentist had to be called to set. We don't know precisely what the issue was - but it sounds like it might have been messy!
The sitcom 'Modern Family' is as warm and cozy a show as it is funny, and one of the main reasons for that is the relationship between Cam and Mitchell - one of the first gay relationships to be depicted on American television where the fact that the characters are gay isn't their most defining trait. Even though they're a big hit with the audience, one of the actors involved didn't feel comfortable with the part at first - Eric Stonestreet, who plays Cam, refused to do any kissing scenes in the first season.
By the second season he'd managed to reconcile himself with who the character was and how he's supposed to behave, and so kissing scenes started to find their way into the script. Even with that taken into account, Cam and Mitchell are nowhere near as openly affectionate as Phil and Claire, so there may be some lingering awkwardness.
While some of the stories in our list are amusing or charming, this one is just gross. When she was only fourteen years old, Kimberley McCullough was asked to kiss a co-star while she was filming 'General Hospital.' That would have been fine, if it weren't for the age difference. The co-star in question was twenty-two years old. McCullough has never disclosed the identity of the co-star, but claims he was on set making sexually charged 'jokes' about kissing a minor on the day that the kiss was supposed to happen.
Needless to say, McCullough refused to go through with it. That wouldn't have been an easy decision to make or stand by as a child actor who was expected to do as they were told, but McCullough was resolute, and so, in the end, the director had to make do with a kiss on the cheek instead of the scene he wanted. You'd like to think that this would never be allowed to happen now.
Following in the footsteps of Jennifer Lawrence, Charlie Sheen makes a second appearance on our list, and has now also refused to kiss someone, and had someone refuse to hiss him. For Sheen, it was Selma Blair that he was unwilling to pucker up to. It wasn't just that he didn't want to kiss her either - he didn't want anything to do with her.
Sheen was still a troubled man when he and Blair made 'Anger Management' together - he was still furious about the way his time on 'Two and a Half Men' ended, and had various personal issues. Blair says it was impossible to work with him on the set, and complained to producers about him. Sheen responded by sending her an abusive text message, and lobbied the producers to fire her. He won. Not only were there no more intimate scenes between Sheen and Blair, there were no more scenes between them at all.
The kiss between Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst in 2002's 'Spiderman' movie is considered to be one of the most iconic in recent cinematic history. The image of Spiderman, hanging upside down in the rain with his mask rolled up over his chin, has been used on posters and billboards everywhere. To be honest, it's just about the only thing a lot of people remember from the movie. That makes it something of a shame that Maguire hated doing it, and wouldn't have gone through with it if he'd had his way.
Maguire's objections to the scene didn't have anything to do with Dunst, who by all accounts is always a pleasure to work with. It was the impracticality that bothered Maguire. Hanging upside down for long periods of time with rain pouring down on him, Maguire says blood was constantly rushing to his head, and the rain went up his nose. At times, the only way he could breathe was out of the side of Dunst's mouth. Not all that romantic after all, then.
We're not saying Thandie Newton is picky, but.... OK, that's actually exactly what we're saying. When she turned up on our list earlier on for refusing to kiss Gerard Butler, we understood the issue. He was sick, and Newton didn't want to get ill. That's fine. Here complaints about kissing Tom Cruise on the set of 'Mission Impossible 2' feel a little rude, though!
According to Newton, Cruise is a fairly unpleasant kisser. She describes the experience of kissing him as 'icky' and 'wet.' Feeling like it was necessary to go further than that, Newton once told an interviewer that when she went home at night after a day filming romantic scenes, she would always complain about how warm the set was, and how many times she had to kiss Cruise. Given that Cruise has been a Hollywood sex symbol for three decades, that's something of a surprise to hear.
To everyone's surprise, we're now chalking up a second appearance for Jennifer Lawrence when it comes to people who didn't enjoy the experience of kissing her! Not only that, but it's a second story that comes from the set of 'Mockingjay.' We can only hope that she's worked on her kissing form since shooting the film. This time, thankfully, the tale doesn't have anything to do with disgusting or odorous food.
Josh Hutcherson had never had a big on-screen kiss with anybody before his scene with Lawrence in the film, so by his own admission, he was a little nervous of it. His mistake was admitting that he was hesitant to his co-star. Lawrence had no such nerves, kissing Hutcherson so enthusiastically that he found it 'abrasive' and 'a little shocking.' In a joint interview, Lawrence concurred by admitting she'd been 'a little slobbery.' Yikes.
Of all the stories which we've come across on this list so far, this might have the strangest reasoning behind it. Miles Teller wasn't happy with the idea of kissing Shailene Woodley when they made 'The Spectacular Now' together, and he had excellent reasoning. Woodley's breath wasn't just bad; it positively stunk.
While it's never nice to laugh at someone who has a hygiene problem, in this case it was a problem entirely of Woodley's own making. As many young actors do, Woodley was going through an 'experimental diet' phase. The diet she'd chosen was called 're-wilding,' and focused on eating the same kinds of food that early indigenous hunter-gatherers once did. To that end, she was regularly consuming sachets of dirt and soil. Teller hated kissing her, and we don't blame him one bit. People are free to diet however they like in their own time, but don't inflict it on other people!
In 2008, Scottish actor James McAvoy made a movie called 'Wanted' with Angelina Jolie. At the time, Jolie was almost universally considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world. There are many men - and women - who would have given almost anything to share a kiss with her. McAvoy found himself not wanting to - but we completely understand why!
McAvoy wasn't as big a name in 2008 as he is now, and found himself a little starstruck around Jolie. He also didn't have any time to get his head around the idea of what he'd be doing. McAvoy had already been filming the movie for two weeks before Jolie was due to join him on set - and the kissing scene was the first one they had together. He'd barely had chance to introduce himself to her before they had to kiss, and McAvoy was so nervous that he was shaking. Immediately afterward, he felt like he'd made such a bad job of it that he felt compelled to apologize.
What is it about some of Hollywood's most stunning leading ladies wanting to make kissing scenes as unpleasant as possible for their partners? Are they trying to tell us something about how kissing scenes make them feel in general? First, we had Jennifer Lawrence tormenting Liam Hemsworth, now Dane Cook found himself as the unwitting receptacle of Kate Hudson's deliberately-induced halitosis!
Cook and Hudson actually got on very well while making 'My Best Friend's Girl' together, so Hudson felt comfortable enough by setting him up for a disgusting time during romantic scenes. Without telling Cook, she ate a handful of 'the smelliest onions she could find' right before the two of them took to the bedroom to shoot the scene. Having been given time to think about it, Cook would later describe the experience as 'the worst on-screen kiss of all time.'
There must be something about British actors that makes them get nervous around bigger stars. First, we had James McAvoy getting anxious about kissing Angelina Jolie. Now we have Carey Mulligan, who got herself in a similar nervous state about kissing Johnny Depp. McAvoy at least got his head around it in the end. Mulligan couldn't, and all of the takes ended up on the cutting room floor!
Mulligan and Depp were making 'Public Enemies' together in 2009 when she had her moment of being starstruck. As she explained to chat show host Graham Norton, as much as she tried to get into character, her brain kept screaming at her 'That's Johnny Depp. You're kissing Johnny Depp!' and she couldn't get away from it. In total, they shot the scene sixteen times, but as Mulligan couldn't manage to look relaxed during a single take, they gave up.
What could be more Australian than Australian actors Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman sharing a passionate kiss in the Australian rain, in a movie called 'Australia'? This big budget epic movie was supposed to be the cinematic masterpiece that got Hollywood interested in the 'Land Down Under' again, years after 'Crocodile Dundee' had done the same thing. It flopped miserably. Audiences just weren't feeling it. Neither, as it turned out, was Jackman when he was kissing Kidman.
We should be fair to Kidman here - it wasn't specifically her that he had the issue is. Although he's left it fairly late in his career to confess it, Jackman doesn't really enjoy kissing people in films in general. He says he's always found it a strange experience to 'make out' with someone when there are 70 cast and crew watching you, and that he isn't sure how other people seem to deal with it so easily.
We're amazed at some of the famous names that people just haven't wanted to kiss. Angelina Jolie. Jennifer Lawrence. Bradley Cooper. Now, incredibly, Leonardo DiCaprio has come in for a near-rejection a second time! Kate Winslet's reasons for not wanting to kiss him again after 'Titanic' were easily understood. Virginie Ledoyen's complaints about kissing DiCaprio in 'The Beach' in 2000 are a little stranger.
Giving an interview to a French magazine, Ledoyen said that she 'wouldn't want DiCaprio as a lover,' and says that kissing him 'lacked honest passion and sensitivity.' It might just be us, but it sounds like Ledoyen forgot that DiCaprio was only acting, and wasn't actually in love with her. Perhaps she was excited about getting the full 'boyfriend experience' from DiCaprio when she landed the part, and came away from it disappointed. We're sure he eventually got over the criticism!
Ever hated the idea of kissing someone so much that you tried to get them fired? Unless you're an actor, we imagine you probably haven't, but we think that this is going a little far even by the flighty standards of some actors! Ryan Gosling didn't enjoy working with Rachel McAdams very much, and lobbied hard for her to be dismissed from 'The Notebook.' The producers kept her, and everything from that point on was awkward for both of them.
Things were so bad between the pair that Gosling wouldn't even read his lines for McAdams unless required to, and persuading the pair to kiss was a full day's work for the director, who probably wished they'd never taken the job. Despite all of this, after the production wrapped, Gosling and McAdams then dated for two years. Who'd have thought it?
We get the impression that Emma Watson almost never does anything that she doesn't want to do, so we're surprised that she decided to go ahead with kissing Rupert Grint. We suppose she couldn't really refuse to do so - everyone knew that their 'Harry Potter' characters eventually kissed in the books, and so it would have been impossible to avoid it on screen. Watson didn't' have so much as an issue with the scene as an issue with kissing Grint. She loved him very much - just not in a romantic way.
What's easy to forget about the 'Harry Potter' cast is that they grew up together in the world's glare, and the only people in the world who understood what it felt like that they could speak to were each other. Watson and Grint had a relationship like a brother and sister, and so kissing each other felt excruciatingly awkward for both of them.
