Jennifer Grey took a trip down memory lane recalling filming a sex scene with Patrick Swayze in 1984’s Red Dawn.
“As an actor, you’re looking at all your stuff in the script, and you’re like, ‘OK, I’m running. I’m shooting. I’m running. I’m throwing hand grenades. I’m killing myself with a hand grenade,’” Grey, 64, said on the Friday, December 20, episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s “Awards Chatter” podcast. “But this is the only acting scene I get to do where I’m not doing action.”
Grey recalled being in a sleeping bag with Swayze, who died at age 57 after battling pancreatic cancer, and noted that he was “nervous.”
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“He came into the sleeping bag drunk,” Grey claimed. “And he didn’t know his lines. And then it got cut. And they said, ‘We’ll come back and reshoot it.’ But, of course, they didn’t.”
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Grey called the scene, which didn’t end up making the film, “one of the more tender scenes which was, I thought, part of the reason I wanted to do the job.”
The movie, which is set in the 1980s, follows teenagers who escape with their friends into the mountains as they prepare for a counter-attack against a Russian-led invasion of their town. Grey and Swayze starred in the film alongside Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson, C. Thomas Howell and more.
While recalling filming Red Dawn, Grey said her costars would “put firecrackers in my door” to “prank” her.
“I think I was smoking a lot of weed in those days, too,” she said. “And so, I was super paranoid, and I was scared. So I didn’t sleep the whole night. So when I went in to shoot my big love scene, my big … romantic scene with him, I was so angry because I was, you know, all self-righteous, like, ‘Hi, how dare you be so unprofessional?’”
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“I didn’t get to sleep and I was anxious and felt like it was a problem, then all of a sudden I was like, ‘You know what? You’re killing me. You’re killing me in this show,’” she continued.
When the movie wrapped, Grey recalled thinking he was “not professional” and was hesitant to have him be in 1987’s Dirty Dancing.
“When they started talking about him for Dirty Dancing, I was like, ‘Oh, no, anybody but him. I know. He’s a dancer. I know he’s a dancer. He talks about it all the time,’” she said, adding that Swayze was in the 1975 musical Goodtime Charley with her dad, Joel Grey, as a dancer.
Ultimately, however, Swayze starred as Johnny in the iconic film, where Grey played Baby. The movie, which followed Baby filling in for Penny (Cynthia Rhodes) as Johnny’s dance partner, produced several memorable moments — including the iconic lift.
“I only did it on the day I shot it,” Grey told The Guardian in 2015 about the scene. “Never rehearsed it, never done it since. I don’t know how all these people who reenact it have the guts to throw themselves into the arms of anyone other than Patrick Swayze. It’s insane!”
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