Do actors and actresses really kiss on screen?
Usually "French" kisses on screen, especially in TV or PG movies, consist of actors pressing their lips while opening and closing their mouths. With their lips sealed as they do this, what goes on inside their mouths is hidden from view. This presents the illusion that their languages meet, but in reality they are not. It's just an assumption that the audience makes.
In more explicit films, the actors will really get tangled up in tongues. Even in those cases, however, the action of the tongue generally remains fairly moderate. This is not necessarily because the actors would feel uncomfortable; these people are generally professionals at doing things on camera that would make most mere mortals uncomfortable. Rather, passionate French kisses between two stimulated people are actually messy-looking, and not the most romantic or picturesque things to see in detail on a big screen.
Here's an example of an "explicit" Hollywood kiss (sorry, it's one of my favorites):
As complete as this kiss looks, seeing a close-up kiss between two lovers, with all the details that an HD camera would capture, would generally not look like this. For the sake of cinematography, Hollywood offers us a much friendlier fantasy about what it's like to kiss.
In their defense, I think directors and actors seek to portray how good a kiss feels to the people involved in it, rather than present a realistic version of what it might look like to a viewer, which I think is the highest priority. in most stories. .
I see this question coming up a lot in one form or another on Quora. I think it suggests that the person asking doesn't have a lot of experience with kissing, both on and off stage, but Quora is all about knowledge, so I'll give you what I know from having trained and worked as an actor.
Yes, the actors' lips really touch, as this is impossible to fake (even though it has been tried - see my other answer on this topic). If, by "really", you want to ask if the two actors are actually attracted to each other or in love, then I'd say it depends.
If the two actors are in a relationship in real life, prior to being hired for their roles, then some of that attraction could manifest itself on the scene. After all, an actor uses her own life experience to help her understand and inform her character.
But if the two actors have only just met, all they are doing is what any good actor would do: grounding themselves in the reality of their characters and the situation in the scene, and allowing the emotion (and the kiss) to unfold. from that. Depending on the level of intimacy represented, there may be some discussion before the scene about the levels of safety and comfort; in fact, actor unions often require this.
While it is true that some actors have started relationships after working together, some unfortunate and perhaps immature actors have confused the emotion generated in the scene with real, and have tried to base a relationship on that, which then fails, because that emotion was created from the characters and circumstances, not the actual attraction.
