Top 10 Times Actors Refused to Kiss On-Screen

Turns out that kissing A-list celebrities isn’t as fun as you may think. Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the top ten times actors refused to kiss other actors on screen. For this list, we’ll be looking at times when an actor hesitated, or even downright refused, to kiss another actor for a movie. To be clear, the actors could have still kissed in the final movie; as long as they initially objected in some way on set, it will be considered.

Fear not – Reese and Robert did not NOT get along, if that makes any sense. In fact, Reese called Robert “amazing and wonderful and sweet and just the nicest guy.” So, yeah, we think he’s a pretty good guy. It’s just that Robert had a wicked cold and Reese refused to have anything to do with him. Reese told In Touch that Robert “had the most hideous horrible cold of any co-star I’ve ever had to do a love scene with.” Unfortunately, Reese had to just suck it up and take one for the team. This same predicament plagued Thandie Newton while filming “RocknRolla,” and unlike Reese, she downright refused to kiss her sick co-star, Gerard Butler.

While filming “The Spectacular Now,” both Woodley and Teller would mess with the other person by eating or drinking some questionable items. Teller told Vulture, “We would put stuff in our mouths so we could just offend each other.” For Teller, that included drinking Gatorade and eating licorice right before a kissing scene. For Woodley, that meant eating Chinese herbal supplements that supposedly tasted like dirt. Or, as Teller poetically put it, “crap.” As you can imagine, this made filming the kissing scenes a little less than fun. And they say Hollywood is glamorous…

Grimes and Ellis both appeared on “True Blood” together. Ellis portrayed series regular Lafayette Reynolds and Grimes played a character named James. In season seven, James meets Ellis’s Lafayette and the two quickly fall into a romantic, and physical, relationship. This was too much for Luke Grimes, and he quit the show over his character’s direction. This greatly upset Ellis, and he told Vulture, “You make a statement, a big statement, when you go ‘I don’t want to play this part because it’s gay.’” He insinuates that HBO was also upset with Grimes’s decision and he was eventually replaced with actor Nathan Parsons.

This story gets a little complicated. Hollywood legend states that Janet Jackson refused to kiss Tupac on the set of “Poetic Justice” until he was tested for AIDS. For those who don’t know, Tupac was quite the player! This urban legend was confirmed by Pac in an interview, who stated that he was approached by about four different people asking him to get tested. Pac’s stepbrother Mopreme also confirmed the story to DJ Vlad in 2015, long after the film had come and gone. However, the rumor was seemingly denied by director John Singleton, who claims that the whole thing was just an inside joke on set that turned into a publicity stunt. So believe what you want!

What IS confirmed legend is that “The Notebook’s” Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling detested each other. Kissing was seemingly out of the question, and Ryan actually tried to have Rachel removed from the set. On one particularly heated day, Ryan pulled director Nick Cassavetes aside and asked him to replace Rachel with another actress because he couldn’t get into character. In Ryan’s own words, he just “couldn’t do it with her.” This in turn prompted Nick to call an impromptu therapy session, and both Ryan and Rachel hashed (or more accurately, yelled) it out. The therapy session seems to have worked, as Ryan and Rachel proceeded to date for two years!

“I Love Trouble” is certainly not one of Julia Roberts’s stronger movies. You never really hear it alongside “Notting Hill” and “Erin Brockovich,” ya know? A major criticism aimed towards the film was the complete lack of chemistry between leads Roberts and Nick Nolte, a significant lack of chemistry that stemmed from their hostile on set relationship. It’s no secret that Roberts and Nolte did not get along while filming, and there were reports that they even refused to shoot certain scenes together. Roberts later called Nolte “completely disgusting,” so we can only imagine what her thoughts were on kissing him!

These two appeared together in “Scary Movie 5,” although Lindsay was not about kissing Charlie. The script reportedly had the two kissing at least three times in one specific scene, but Lindsay voiced concerns over kissing Charlie due to his wild past. What she was specifically afraid of, we cannot say. The producers eventually relented to Lindsay’s concerns, and they both used a body double and wrote some kisses out of the script. At the end of the day, Lindsay and Charlie’s lips never locked. Hilariously, this firm reluctance didn’t upset Charlie one bit, and he later gave Lindsay $100,000 to help sort out her tax troubles!

Back in 1993, Will Smith tried his hand at a small independent movie called “Six Degrees of Separation.” He played a gay conman named Paul, and one scene in particular called for Smith to passionately kiss Anthony Michael Hall on screen. Smith showed great hesitance and refused to film this sequence, and enraged director Fred Schepisi was forced to use a stand-in. To his credit, Will later regretted the decision, saying, “I wasn’t emotionally stable enough to artistically commit to that aspect of the film.” He also regretted his behavior in front of “actors and a director and writer of [that] caliber.”

Poor Julia Roberts pops up yet again, although this one is all on Denzel. Newsweek reporter Allison Samuels revealed in her book “Off the Record” that Denzel refused to film a love scene with Julia Roberts in the movie “The Pelican Brief” out of respect for his African American fans. And no, not in a racist way! Washington is quoted as saying, “Black women are not often seen as objects of desire on film. And they have always been my core audience.” As such, he refused to kiss Julia, a white national symbol of sexiness.

While filming “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” Brad Pitt was deeply in love with his then-girlfriend Angelina Jolie. And it quickly became annoying to his fellow cast and crew mates. Co-star Cate Blanchett jokingly told The Telegraph that it was “disgusting” to see how in love Pitt was with Jolie. This could have something to do with Pitt’s refusal to kiss “a gorgeous redhead” during filming (FYI, Cate Blanchett had red hair in the movie). According to an anonymous source who spoke to The National Enquirer, Pitt initially refused to kiss the actress, citing a possible motivation of not wanting to upset a jealous Jolie. Regardless, he was eventually talked into it and the scene commenced as planned.