Anybody who is married to an actor like George Clooney is likely prepared for the fact that, at some point, their job is going to require them to kiss other people. It’s a strange job actors have. And while I’m sure spouses and significant others don’t love their partners kissing others, it’s a thing they have to do for work. But I feel like George Clooney’s wife Amal is perhaps a bit justified in her reaction when she found out her husband had done a kissing scene with Julia Roberts 80 times in a new movie.
George Clooney and Julia Roberts will co-star in the upcoming film Ticket to Paradise where they play a divorced couple that joins forces to try and stop their daughter’s wedding. Since Ticket to Paradise is a rom-com, there is a kiss between the two leads, and the duo tell the New York Times the single kiss took them quite some time to get right. As they explained…
ROBERTS: One kiss. And we did it for, like, six months.
CLOONEY: Yeah. I told my wife, ‘It took 80 takes.’ She was like, ‘What the hell?’
ROBERTS: It took 79 takes of us laughing and then the one take of us kissing.
CLOONEY: Well, we had to get it right.
It’s unclear why this single kiss scene apparently took so long, unless Julia Roberts isn’t exaggerating when she says that most of the takes were ruined by the two of them laughing. George Clooney and Julia Roberts have been friends for a long time, and made a few movies together, so it probably was a bit weird kissing each other, and that tension could have easily been broken by the two laughing over it all.
It’s not exactly surprising that somebody responded to learning that a kissing scene took 80 takes, assuming the pair are not exaggerating even a little, with “what the hell?” Honestly, that should be the response to any scene taking 80 takes. When you can’t get a shot after the first few takes normally the director would be trying to figure out what they need to do to make this work. I suppose when you’re dealing with George Clooney and Julia Roberts you probably don’t get too mad at your stars for screwing up take after take. Maybe that’s why it took six months. Eventually you just quit and come back later.
You have to figure the question from George Clooney’s wife wasn’t figurative. She probably really did want to know exactly why the hell the scene took 80 takes. There had to be a story there. Even if the story was “we couldn’t stop laughing.”