- Brooke Shields praised her Pretty Baby co-star Keith Carradine for being “protective and caring.”
- On “The Drew Barrymore Show,” she said Carradine assured her that their on-screen kiss “didn’t count.”
- Shields was just 11 while Carradine was 28 when they made the controversial 1978 film.
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Brooke Shields has praised her Pretty Baby co-star for assuring her that the kiss they shared on camera when she was 11 “didn’t count” as her first kiss.
The actress and model guest-starred 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 had been.
While discussing her experience of being exploited by the directors of her early works, Shields pointed out that Keith Carradine, who starred opposite her in the controversial 1978 film, actually treated her “graciously” and “protectively” on set.
“Men like Keith Carradine have taken such good care of me,” she told Barrymore.
Regarding the scene in the film where she and Carradine kissed on camera, she said, “He looked at me and said, ‘You know, that doesn’t count as a first kiss.'”
“That was gracious and protective and caring on a level that I didn’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 older than Shields when they made the film, which was directed by the late French filmmaker Louis Malle and was nominated for a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival the year it was released.
In the film, Shields played a 12-year-old girl named Violet who is raised by her sex worker mother, Hattie (Susan Sarandon), in a New Orleans brothel until she elopes with a customer. A photographer named Bellocq (Carradine) then fills in as Violet’s father figure, although their relationship is also a sexual one.
Brooke Shields and Keith Carradine in the movie Pretty Baby (1978). Paramount Pictures
In her new Hulu documentary, which was released on April 3, Shields said she felt overwhelmed on the film’s set for many reasons, but said she “wanted to make everyone happy” with her attempted performance. not to make a big deal out of the kiss.
However, when it came to shooting the kiss, she fought not to grimace in disgust until Carradine told her it was “pretend” and “imagine” — which was exactly what she needed to hear to to get her through the scene.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, the documentary’s director, Lana Wilson, said: “This is a moment that I wanted to show and unpack because even if Kind Brooke was fully aware of the role she was playing, and even if When she realized this acting was fake, I can’t help but think, ‘This is a real 11-year-old girl kissing a real 29-year-old man.’”
“This is inescapably real. And the effect of that is real too. Brooke, 11, expressed uneasiness during the filming of that moment, but that uneasiness was not taken seriously by the director,” Wilson added.
Shields also said in the documentary that she struggled “to stay in touch with my own sexuality” while growing up.
Though she was romantically involved with Michael Jackson, John Travolta, and John F. Kennedy Jr. during her teenage years, she revealed that Dean Cain, who she dated while she was a student at Princeton, was actually her first real boyfriend.