Three years before Dirty Dancing, Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze were in a sleeping bag, definitely not having the time of their lives.
The Ferris Bueller’s Day Off actress recently recalled her first sex scene with the Road House star while they were shooting 1984’s Red Dawn, and neither actor had their wits about them.
“We were in this, you know, sleeping bag and he, I guess, was nervous or whatever,” Grey explained on the new episode of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast. “And he came into the sleeping bag drunk, and he didn’t know his lines. And then it got cut. And they said, ‘We’ll come back and reshoot it.’ But of course they didn’t.”
To make matters worse, Grey wasn’t necessarily sober at the time, and some of her neighbors had pranked her with firecrackers the night before. “I was smoking a lot of weed in those days, too, and so I was super paranoid, and I was scared,” she said. “So I didn’t sleep the whole night. So when I went in to shoot my big love scene, my big death-scene love scene, romantic scene with him, I was so angry because I was all self-righteous. I was like, ‘How dare you be so unprofessional?'”
Grey remembered telling off her costar. “I didn’t get to sleep, and I was anxious and felt like it was a problem,” she said. “And then all of a sudden I was like, ‘You know what? You’re killing me.’ …And he was also super bossy because he took it on. Like, [director] John Milius said to him, ‘You know, you’re the leader and you have to be alpha.'”
She continued, “The whole thing was just — it was just not my scene, the whole movie. So I was trying to hang in there.”
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Grey’s unfavorable impression of Swayze made her hesitant when his name came up in conversations about another film: 1987’s Dirty Dancing. “By the time that movie was over, I was like, ‘This guy is not professional. He is killing me,'” she recalled. “And then when they started talking about him for Dirty Dancing, I was like, ‘Oh, oh no, anybody but him.'” The pair would go on to star opposite each other in the romantic classic.
Red Dawn also starred C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen, and Brad Savage as Colorado teenagers defending their hometown from a Soviet invasion. The film grossed $38 million at the box office and ultimately spawned a 2012 remake, which starred Chris Hemsworth, Josh Peck, and Josh Hutcherson.
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Rumors have circulated that Dirty Dancing will get its own contemporary follow-up, and Grey shared an update on the project’s status at Lionsgate.
“They have been adamant about making it, and I have been adamant about respecting the original, out of respect to Patrick… and the generations of fans,” Grey said on the podcast after recalling how she made up with Swayze. “There is no way that I’m going to be part of it unless it feels true. And what I mean by true is, it has to feel like it is about the original intent with the same clarity of vision about important things. And giving someone a great experience and that feel-good feeling — that feel-good vibe that people watch it because it makes them feel seen and alive.”
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