Expect Gwyneth Paltrow to stick to her principles.
While she and Ethan Hawke share a number of tender moments, including some that would qualify as intimate, in Alfonso Cuarón‘s 1998 adaptation of Great Expectations, Paltrow passed on doing what would have been—as the actors described it 27 years later—a far more explicit love scene.
“Do you remember Alfonso pitching you the love scene?” Hawke asked Paltrow in a December conversation for Vanity Fair.
“Oh my god,” she recalled, “he’s like [in the Mexican director’s accent], ‘And then he’s going to go down on you,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my god, my father’s going to have a heart attack!'” (Paltrow was very close to her dad, Bruce Paltrow, who died in 2002.)
Hawke continued, also mimicking Cuarón (whom he called a “wonderful lunatic”), “‘He’s going to go down on you, the camera’s 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 when you reach ecstasy, the light will explode like to the sun!'”
“And,” the Blue Moon star added, “I remember Gwyneth is like, ‘Alfonso, I’m never going to do that.'”
