Young Actors Who Had To Kiss Considerably Older Co-Stars

We've all heard the adage that "age is just a number." Tell that to a young actor nervously facing the prospect of filming a heavy-duty on-screen make-out session with a co-star 20, 30, 40 or even 50 years older. While these actors are no doubt lovely people (most of them, anyway), film viewers are left with the image of a fresh-faced young person acting out a steamy love scene with someone old enough to be a parent, or, in some cases a grandparent.

Sometimes these age gaps can be troubling for actors, for a variety of reasons. For example, in 2013 Variety reported that Kristen Stewart — who was then 23 — was attached to star in a film when Will Smith (then 45) was cast in the lead, set to play her love interest. Stewart reportedly then dropped out due to her "feeling that the age difference between the two would be too large a gap."

While that onscreen pairing never occurred, many more have, with even wider age gaps than that. Read on to find out more about young actors who had to kiss considerably older costars.

In the 2003 comedy Something's Gotta Give, Jack Nicholson plays music exec Harry Sanborn, pushing 70 yet still insistent on dating women under 30 — or as critic Roger Ebert wrote in his review, he was basically playing himself. In the film, Harry is dating Marin (Amanda Peet, 35 years Nicholson's junior), but surprises himself when he becomes intrigued by Marin's mom, played by the far more age-appropriate Diane Keaton. 

The relationship between Harry and Marin, however, isn't the only May-December romance in the film. Keaton's character, a playwright named Erica, becomes the object of affection for a young doctor played by Keanu Reeves, who is 18 years younger than the Annie Hall Oscar winner.

In an interview about the film for MovieHole, Reeves described kissing Keaton as "nerve-wracking." He added, "Kissing someone is pretty intimate, actually, very intimate and your heart always kind of skips a beat before you do that, but with my character, it was OK." Interestingly enough, after the movie came out reports emerged that Reeves and Keaton also dated in real life.

Older actors paired romantically on screen with younger actresses had become such a Hollywood trope that audiences were hardly shocked by the quarter-century age difference between co-stars Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in 1972's Last Tango in Paris, who were 48 and 19 respectively. What did shock audiences, however, was a particularly notorious scene dreamed up by Brando, involving non-consensual sex and a stick of butter.

Decades later, Schneider opened up about how the role — and that scene specifically — had left her traumatized long after the cameras stopped rolling. "That scene wasn't in the original script. The truth is it was Marlon who came up with the idea," she told the Daily Mail, revealing she was only told about it that day. Although the rape was only simulated, she admitted she "was crying real tears" throughout filming. "I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by [director Bernardo Bertolucci]." 

While there was speculation at the time that she and Brando had actual sex in the film, she shot down those rumors. "Not at all," she said. "There was no attraction between us. For me, he was more like a father figure and I a daughter." To this day, the film continues to make lists of the most awkward and inappropriate sex scenes of all time. 

Critically acclaimed in its time, one aspect of Woody Allen's 1979 opus Manhattan has not aged well: the affair between Allen's middle-aged protagonist and his 17-year-old mistress (Mariel Hemingway, who was actually just 16 at the time it was filmed). In 2018, The New York Times took a retrospective look at the film, noting, "No characters in the movie seem very troubled by the ethics of the affair, nor did many critics at the time." In a 2010 interview with The New Cinema (via Vanity Fair), Hemingway revealed that she "had never kissed anybody" and the prospect of kissing Allen in the film "terrified me. I was worried about it for weeks." In the end, she added, "I didn't have to do much... he attacked me like I was a linebacker." Making matters even more seedy, Hemingway alleged that Allen attempted to seduce her a few years later.

Four decades later, however, that onscreen age gap became more disturbing when it was revealed that Allen once had a real-life teenage girlfriend for real: Babi Christina Engelhardt, who told The Hollywood Reporter that she was 16 when she entered into a secret "eight-year affair" with Allen, who was 41 when it began.  

In fact, Manhattan wasn't the only of his films to feature Allen playing a character involved with a far younger woman. In his 1992 film Husbands and Wives, Allen's character becomes obsessed with his 20-year-old student, played by Juliette Lewis — who is nearly 40 years younger than Allen. 

Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts co-starred in the 1994 romantic comedy I Love Trouble. Nolte, then in his mid-50s, was still landing leading-man roles opposite far younger actresses. That was the case with Roberts, who was still in her 20s when she was cast opposite Nolte.

The movie's title proved to be an apt one, as the actors' 26-year age gap was the least of their differences. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, the duo's steamy love scenes were complicated by the fact that Roberts and Nolte hated each other's guts. The co-stars' "less-than-sparkling chemistry" was explained by on-set sources claiming they clashed, including rumors that "tempers flared early on, peppered with a few Roberts tantrums along the way." In fact, sources claimed that the actors "played more to stand-ins than to each other." 

Unfortunately, up-close kissing scenes couldn't be faked with stand-ins, meaning the pair had to rely on their world-class acting skills to pretend they didn't loathe each other. Roberts summed it up when she told The New York Times that while Nolte could be "charming and nice, he's also completely disgusting." Nolte returned the insult (via News.com.au), saying, "It's not nice to call someone 'disgusting.' But she's not a nice person," he snarked, adding, "Everyone knows that."

Gary Cooper was in the waning days of his tenure as a Hollywood leading man when he co-starred with Audrey Hepburn in romantic comedy Love in the Afternoon, about the relationship that develops between a long-in-the-tooth playboy and a young woman in her 20s. Helmed by Sabrina director Billy Wilder, the film once again paired Hepburn with a significantly older onscreen love interest, given that Cooper was 28 years older than Hepburn.  

According to Cinephilia & Beyond, the substantial age difference between the stars led to a bit of hand-wringing from the studio. In order to try to avoid "general moralistic disgust," Wilder attempted to "delicately handle the matter" onscreen by keeping the scenes between the characters as chaste as possible, letting audiences fill in the blanks in their minds. So worrisome was the age gap, Cinephilia & Beyond reminds, Cooper's line — "I can't even get to first base with her" — was said to be dubbed in after the fact so audiences could rest assured that Hepburn's character hadn't been deflowered. Meanwhile, the film's U.S. version concludes with narration informing that the stars' characters had gotten married to avoid speculation they were living in sin. 

According to IMDb, the film's failure at the box office hit Cooper so hard it led him to get a facelift.

In HBO's Game of Thrones, Petyr Baelish — a.k.a. Littlefinger, played by Aidan Gillen — had spent his life in love with Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley). When she was murdered during Westeros' deadliest wedding reception, he eventually transferred his romantic desires to Lady Catelyn's eldest daughter, Sansa (Sophie Turner) — although he ultimately married her off to psychotic sadist Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon), resulting in a downright horrific wedding night. 

The 28-year-age difference between Turner and Gillen clearly wasn't a factor with some fans. In an Entertainment Weekly interview with Turner, she admitted she didn't understand why some of the show's viewers had been hoping for a Sansa-Littlefinger romance after a scene in which he kisses her. "That was really weird, actually," she said of fans voicing their opinions online that the characters should hook up. "When the kiss happened, my Twitter exploded with 'Eww! that's disgusting!' And like the next day I got a ton of tweets going, 'Ohhhh, they should be together.'"

While Turner didn't comment on what it was like to kiss an actor significantly older than herself, she did point out that her co-star "has a daughter who's like a year younger than me."

When discussing young actors kissing older co-stars, it's impossible to ignore the 1971 comedy Harold and Maude. In the film, babyfaced Bud Cort plays the titular Harold, a young man who has a bizarre obsession with death and attends funerals of people he doesn't know. It's at one of these that he meets Maude (Ruth Gordon), an eccentric 79-year-old with a passion for life, and they become romantically involved. When Cort was cast, reported The Guardian, he was just 20. His co-star was 75, an age difference of a whopping 55 years. 

The film proved to be a critical and commercial flop, even though it would go on to become a cult favorite. "You couldn't drag people in," producer Charles Mulvehill told Peter Biskind in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, noted The Guardian. "The idea of a 20-year-old boy with an 80-year-old woman just made people want to vomit. If you asked people what it was about, ultimately it became a boy who was f**king his grandmother."

Still, Cort and Gordon wound up bonding, and remained good friends until her death in 1985; he described their relationship to The Guardian as "one of the most important friendships I've ever had. She was a great woman."