Jennifer Gray and Patrick Swayze were sizzling on the big screen in Dirty Dancing, but it was in a previous project where the two first tested their chemistry.
The A Real Pain actress, 64, has revealed that her and Swayze’s first love scene fell apart rather than flopped.
The two were working on 1984’s Red Dawn, an action film about a group of teenagers who take to the mountains and fight after a Soviet invasion of the US hits their small Colorado town.
The script called for a sex scene between protagonist Swayze and relative newcomer Grey.
“As an actor, you look at all your stuff in the script and think, ‘Okay. I’m running. I’m shooting. I’m running. I’m throwing hand grenades. “I’m killing myself with a hand grenade, but this is the only acting scene I can do where I’m not doing action,” he said. The Hollywood Reporter Awards Talk podcast.
He said the sex scene was “one of the cutest scenes and I thought it was part of the reason I wanted to do the job.”
Jennifer Grey, 64, opened up about her first on-camera sex scene with her late co-star Patrick Swayze, and revealed it wasn’t for Dirty Dancing (pictured in London in October).
However, when the time came to do so, the veteran actress revealed that her co-star was drunk.
“We were in this, you know, sleeping bag, and he was nervous or something, and he came into the sleeping bag drunk,” she explained.
She said the actor “didn’t know his lines.” And then they cut it. And they said, “We’ll come back and re-film it.” But, of course, they didn’t.
Gray explained that the situation was not helped by the fact that she “also smoked a lot of weed in those days.”
‘And then, I was super paranoid and I was scared. I didn’t sleep all night. So when I went in to film my big love scene, my big… romantic scene with him, I was very angry because, you know, I was all self-righteous.’
“Keep in mind, I’m a super young actor,” he added. “(I was) taking everything very seriously, and maybe a little upset… because I want to do good.”
The actress revealed that during filming, some of her co-stars played pranks on her, even putting ‘firecrackers on my door’.
In the podcast conversation, Gray recalled meeting Swayze again before a Dirty Dancing screen test.
Gray and Swayze had worked together on 1984’s Red Dawn when they were teenagers fighting against the Soviet invasion of the US that included their small Colorado town. They were supposed to film a sex scene, but Gray said Swayze showed up drunk and didn’t know his lines.
The actress revealed that she had also been “smoking a lot of marijuana those days” and “was super paranoid and scared.” I didn’t sleep all night. The scene was removed from the film (seen here with Lea Thomspon, Doug Toby, Charlie Sheen, Swayze, C. Thomas Howell and Brad Savage)
Gray admitted that she was hesitant to work with Swayze on Dirty Dancing because he and some of her other Red Dawn co-stars had pranked her during the film’s production, but was convinced during their screen test together. “He takes me in his arms and I said, ‘Oh, boy. I’ve finished now”.
“He took me down the hall and said, ‘I love you, I love you, and I’m so sorry. And I know you don’t want me to do the movie,'” Gray said of the interaction. .
And his eyes filled with tears. And my eyes filled with tears, not for the same reason. I thought, “Oh, this guy is working me.” And he says, “We could kill him, we could kill him if we did this.”
She said Swayze, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2009 at age 57, convinced her after they started the screen test, explaining: “We walk in there and he takes me in his arms and I was like, ‘Oh, boy. I’m done.”‘
Dirty Dancing was a huge success, and the small-budget film grossed an estimated $214 million at the box office.