Expect Gwyneth Paltrow to stick to her principles. While she and Ethan Hawke share a number of tender moments in Alfonso Cuarón’s 1998 adaptation of *Great Expectations*, including some that would qualify as intimate, Paltrow passed on a scene that, as the actors described it 27 years later, would have been far more explicit.
“Do you remember Alfonso pitching you the love scene?” Hawke asked Paltrow in a December conversation for *Vanity Fair*.
“Oh my god,” she recalled. “He’s like [in the Mexican director’s accent], ‘And then he’s going to go down on you,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my god, my father’s going to have a heart attack!’”
Paltrow was very close to her dad, Bruce Paltrow, who passed away in 2002.
Hawke continued, also mimicking Cuarón (whom he called a “wonderful lunatic”): “‘He’s going to go down on you, the camera’s going to go down your belly, and then it’s going to go up your breasts! And then it’s going to go in your face as you reach ecstasy! And when you reach ecstasy, the light will explode like to the sun!’”
And, the *Blue Moon* star added, “I remember Gwyneth is like, ‘Alfonso, I’m never going to do that.’”
“In my early career,” the 53-year-old Paltrow recalled, “I was really self-conscious about my dad and grandfather seeing this kind of stuff. Like, it really bothered me. Now I wouldn’t care.”
Hawke, 55, complimented Paltrow for being “amazing” about it. “You weren’t petulant,” he told her. “You were just saying, like, ‘Look, I’m not going to do this.’”
“Maybe I was too prudish in the moment,” Paltrow admitted.
But Hawke demurred, saying, “I don’t think you are.”
“I was definitely worried about,” she reiterated.
More importantly, however, Paltrow assured Hawke that a kiss she shares with Timothée Chalamet in *Marty Supreme* did not take place in the same spot in Central Park where Stella’s lips brushed against Finn’s at the water fountain in *Great Expectations*.
https://www.eonline.com/news/1426649/gwyneth-paltrow-on-why-she-refused-ethan-hawke-sex-scene?cmpid=rss-syndicate-genericrss-us-top_stories
