This past November, Jennifer Lawrence admitted that she was a nervous wreck while filming her first-ever s-x scene, with Chris Pratt, for the upcoming sci-fi romance Passengers.
“I had my first real s-x scene a couple weeks ago, and it was really bizarre,” Lawrence admitted to fellow actresses Helen Mirren and Cate Blanchett during The Hollywood Reporter’s awards-season roundtable. “It was really weird.”
Her co-star was Pratt, and Lawrence said she couldn’t get past the fact that she had to film a love scene with a married man.
“It was going to be my first time kissing a married man, and guilt is the worst feeling in your stomach,” Lawrence explained. “And I knew it was my job, but I couldn’t tell my stomach that,” she added, saying that she even called her mom for reassurance. “You want to do it real, you want everything to be real, but then . . . That was the most vulnerable I’ve ever been.”
So last week, when Pratt was in Las Vegas to promote Passengers at CinemaCon, MTV asked for his perspective on the scene, and on working with the actress.
“I had never met Jen prior to doing Passengers,” Pratt said. “Of course I knew of her, I knew her work. [But] we jumped right into basically working so the first time we met was at her house doing a table read with the director, and so we really bonded over the script and the story.
“As we were working together, because we are essentially the only two people in the movie, as we were working together in Atlanta, we just became fast friends,” Pratt explained. “And we bonded over a mutual love of Dumb & Dumber. Just like jokes and life.”
Despite their bonding, the two did need to mentally prepare for the love scene.
“Aside from doing a great job and telling a good story, I think your primary goal is to make the other person comfortable,” Pratt said of the endeavor. “She wanted to have some wine, so we did, and that was nice.”
Judging by footage of Passengers shown at CinemaCon, the wine worked. The two actors have palpable chemistry on-screen. She plays a glamorous New York writer while he plays a mechanic. The two embark on a 120-year voyage to another planet, only to wake up years too early mid-space flight.
Sony Pictures chairman Tom Rothman joined the actors onstage to tease the project.
“The original script for Passengers was as compelling as any one I’ve ever read,” said Rothman by means of introduction. “To me it is both intim-te and epic . . . and that required two exceptional actors, particularly given the emotional and action gauntlet that the characters must run. . . . This is about two people who take a voyage to space knowing that they will never come back to their families again.”
