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Brooke Shields praised her “Pretty Baby” costar Keith Carradine for being “protective and caring.”
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On “The Drew Barrymore Show,” she said that Carradine reassured her that their on-screen kiss didn’t “count.”
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Shields was just 11 while Carradine was 28 when they shot the controversial 1978 movie.
Brooke Shields has praised her “Pretty Baby” costar who reassured her that the kiss they shared on camera when she was 11 years old didn’t “count” as her first kiss.
The actor and model appeared as a guest on “The Drew Barrymore Show” on Tuesday to promote her two-part documentary, “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” which chronicles how she found her agency after being sexualized at a young age.
While discussing her experience of being exploited by the directors of her early works, Shields pointed out that Keith Carradine, who appeared opposite her in the controversial 1978 film, was actually “gracious” and “protective” of her on set.
“Men like Keith Carradine took such good care of me,” she told Barrymore.
Referring to the scene in the film in which she and Carradine kissed on camera, she said: “He looked at me and said, ‘You know, this doesn’t count as a first kiss.'”
“That was gracious and protective and caring on a level that I don’t even think I knew at the time,” she said, adding that up to that point she had “never kissed a boy before.”
Carradine was 16 years Shields’ senior when they shot the movie, which was directed by the late French filmmaker Louis Malle and nominated for the Palm d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival the year of its release.
In the film, Shields played a 12-year-old girl, named Violet, who is being raised in a New Orleans brothel by her sex worker mother, Hattie (Susan Sarandon), until she elopes with a customer. A photographer named Bellocq (Carradine) then steps in as a father figure for Violet, although their relationship is also a sexual one.
Speaking in her new Hulu documentary, which was released on April 3, Shields said that she felt out of her depth for a lot of reasons on the set of the movie, but said she “wanted to make everybody happy” with her performance so tried not to make a big deal out of it of the kiss.
Nevertheless, when it came to shooting the kiss, she struggled not to scrunch up her face in revulsion until Carradine told her that it was “pretend” and “make-believe” — which was exactly what she needed to hear to get her through the scene.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, the documentary’s director, Lana Wilson, said: “This is a moment I wanted to feature and unpack because, even if child Brooke was fully cognizant of the role she was playing, and even if she realized that acting was pretend, I can’t help but think: ‘This is an actual 11-year-old girl having to kiss an actual 29-year-old man.'”
“That inescapably is real. And the impact of that is real, too. 11-year-old Brooke expressed discomfort during the filming of this moment, but that discomfort was not taken seriously by the director,” Wilson added.
Shields also said in the documentary that she struggled to be “in touch with any of my own sexuality” while growing up.
Although she was romantically linked to the likes of Michael Jackson, John Travolta, and John F. Kennedy Jr. during her teenage years, she revealed that Dean Cain, who she dated while studying at Princeton, was actually her first real boyfriend.
Read the original article on Insider
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