Maybe I’m immature for my age, but if a woman smiles at me in a certain way, I can’t stop thinking about her for a week.
How in the world do actors who kiss on-screen avoid falling in love?
Sometimes they don’t. The rest are professionals.
That’s like asking why hookers don’t fall in love with every one of their customers.
Encouraged halitosis.
A week? That sounds like infatuation to me. But I’m not here to nitpick or criticize, especially because I can relate to what you’re saying. The main reason is probably because they’ve had a lot more amorous experience than you or I and are less prone to swooning.
You wrote, “smiles at me in a certain way,” which makes me think that it doesn’t happen to you all that often. I suppose good-looking actors get smiled at that way a lot more than we do. My apologies if that’s not your case.
I was going to say something about professionalism, but it’s already been mentioned.
IME they are paid professionals and may likely have a significant other, so are able to compartmentalize their work from their love life. I am sure it happens occasionally, however.
Tangential question: how does an actor’s spouse or significant other deal with seeing their loved-one in a kissing scene with another actor? More tangential: how does one acting in a heavy kissing scene, specifically the male, prevent ones-self from, uh, appearing aroused?
I would expect that the presence of an entire film crew and lighting would help to spoil any romantic mood or erotic feeling.
“Take 37: This time, tilt your head a little more to the left.”
Nothing personal, it’s just business. Tell Diane Keaton I always liked her.
Sometimes actors are cast in roles with someone that the already know from being in the business and do not like each other.
10 Big-Screen Couples Who Hated Each Other in Real Life (businessinsider.com)
This. I have read so many times in interviews that it is not sexy to be doing that stuff surrounded by dozens of people closely observing you.
I’m able to understand how feelings don’t develop from kissing scenes, and even how erections don’t come into play most of the time, but there was one scene from Game of Thrones, where two characters were “having relations” in the style of doggies, with lots of noises, flopping, hard thrusting, etc. for an extended period. When the simulated formication was complete, the male actor stepped out from behind the semi-prostrate nude female actor, completely nude, with genitals flopping in the breeze. Both actors appeared to be completely nude throughout the scene without edits. Upon watching, I remarked to my wife how challenging that scene must’ve been for the male actor. In fact, I really don’t know how he could keep things from arising.
Maybe he “cleared the pipes” beforehand?
In a lot of cases they don’t avoid it. Here’s an article with 50 actors who began as on-screen couples and became real-life couples:
I have heard that that happens with some amount of frequency with regular married couples.
Celebs tend to have a bigger dating pool than us mere mortals. A kiss for us is an awesome day. A kiss for them is just another Tuesday.
Also, what @Tusculan said.
A professional is probably thinking “Now I have to raise my eyebrow just so far and turn a little to the left just like my acting coach showed me. Hope the director likes this and casts me in the next film. Oh ---- is my partner flubbing this scene AGAIN?”
How about a counterexample? It was reported that Richard Burton was initially disgusted that he was acting opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. The rest is history.
A glaring omission is Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Rogers was a party girl and Astaire was a prude. But they were professionals and worked together despite their distaste for each other.
I’m surprised Jessie Plemons and Kirsten Dunst aren’t mentioned. They’re not married IRL, but consider themselves to be so.
From my experience on one film set and from reading Entertainment Magazine back in the day, I would say that it’s probably quite common for (film) actors to form a relation with the person that their character likes.
- Method acting says that you’re going to act best when you’re in the frame of mind of the character as much as possible. So, these actors are basically trying to have romantic thoughts in their heads about that other person for the whole period of the filming process.
- (No offense to them but…) Your average (film) actor tends to be pretty shallow. Fundamentally, these are people who live for attention, others praise, and to embody the minds of other people. And you don’t go to Hollywood to do serious stuff - you just as likely went there out of the dream of becoming famous and being able to party it up.
That might all be different for people who are predominantly stage actors, though. At least, my drama teachers back when I was young seemed like fairly regular people and I know that they also worked as professional actors in local stage plays. Maybe they had that same phase of shallowness when they began but grew out of it, where Hollywood allows it to persist and even rewards you for it. I don’t know. But, minus more information, I’d be willing to believe that they just get used to doing it and don’t even notice after the 800th performance.
I forgot the details but it seeming was a issue for the Harry Potter crew which many were teenagers and there were crushes between the actors.
Yeah, if you’re a teen with raging hormones (or older, but still with teen hormones), it could be a problem.
I had to do a a full run of a play where the whole plot revolved around how besotted I was with the female lead. She was nice enough, but we just had zero feelings for each other…which made all the clinches and ‘ravishing’ just another scene.
“Ho hum, have to have another sword fight, and then make mad, passionate love again… I really should have hydrated more before this performance…”
From that article: " [Amanda] Seyfried admits falling in love on set is “one of the easiest things in the world. You’re put in a situation where you have to make out with each other. It’s easy for things to get carried away.”"
So, sometimes they’re professionals, sometimes they really don’t like each other, and sometimes they do fall in love.