Gwyneth Paltrow has always known when to put her foot down.
The actress had a conversation with former co-star Ethan Hawke for Vanity Fair, and they spoke in detail about their experience of filming 1998’s “Great Expectations” – including the explicit sex scene that she flat-out refused to do.
“Do you remember Alfonso pitching you the love scene?” Hawke asked, referring to the film’s director, Alfonso Cuarón.
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Paltrow replied, “Oh my god,” explaining that Cuarón had wanted to film a scene in which her character received oral sex from Hawke’s character.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, my father’s going to have a heart attack,” she remembered.
Hawke impersonated Cuarón, saying, “The camera is going to go down your belly, and then it’s going to go up your breasts, and then it’s going to go in your face as you reach ecstasy. And then when you reach ecstasy, the light will explode like to the sun!”
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Paltrow laughed at the impersonation, and Hawke added, “And I remember looking at Gwyneth, and Gwyneth is like, ‘Alfonso, I’m never going to do that.'”
“But you know, I had, in my early career, I was really self-conscious about my dad and grandfather seeing this kind of stuff,” she said. “Like, it really bothered me.”
She added, “Now, I wouldn’t care.”
Hawke praised the way she handled the refusal back then, remembering she was firm but not “petulant,” and Paltrow said, “Maybe I was too prudish in the moment.”
“I was definitely worried about it,” she noted.
In “Great Expectations,” a modernization of the Charles Dickens classic, Hawke starred as Finn, a painter who was fixated on Paltrow’s Estella. During their conversation, she revealed that she nearly missed out on the role because of a fear that she didn’t have the right look for the character.
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She said that she met with Cuarón and was “very excited” at the prospect of doing the movie, but “then there was a little blip where someone at the studio thought I wasn’t pretty enough to do it, remember?”
Hawke, shaking his head, answered, “That’s the kind of s— that happens all the time.”
“I think [Cuarón] was convinced otherwise and then I finally got the part,” she recalled.
