Making out at auditions to test the chemistry between co-stars? Apparently, in Hollywood, it was a common practice that generated quite a bit of embarrassment… but also some positive reactions. Naomi Watts and Nicole Kidman shared very different experiences with each other.
Recently, some statements by Anne Hathaway caused a great stir. The diva confided to V Magazine that, at the beginning of his career “it was considered normal to ask an actor to making out with other actors to test the chemistry”. Was this really the practice in the early 2000s? It seems so. Naomi Watts And Nicole Kidmanduring a round table of The Hollywood Reporterthey told their experiences in this regard, which were very different from each other.
“I was told, ‘We have 10 guys coming today and you’re in the cast. Aren’t you excited to make out with all of them?’ – Hathaway revealed in the interview – And I thought, ‘Is there something wrong with me?’ because I wasn’t excited. I thought it sounded disgusting.” The memories of Naomi Watts they are not very different. The diva remembered a particular audition embarrassingin which she was asked to simulate a make-out session with a famous actor, again for the famous ‘chemistry test’.
I was auditioning and didn’t get the job, so clearly I didn’t make out well. She was with a very well-known actor. It was mortifying, because we didn’t hear a ‘cut’ and it just kept going. Then they said, ‘Okay, okay.’ And we both thought, ‘Oh, sorry, we didn’t hear…’. I felt a little shaken.
The star of The Impossible he did not reveal the identity of the actor in question nor the role or the film he was auditioning for. She was equally reserved Nicole Kidman, despite sharing an anecdote with the opposite flavor. “Excited to make out with someone? I think maybe I was secretly excited” replied the protagonist of Moulin Rouge! Who will be the lucky one Nicole refers to?
Beyond the joke, Kidman doesn’t believe the practice in question is useful as a test for calculating screen affinity either. On the contrary, he finds it completely superfluous. “You can’t have chemistry [nell’audizione, ndr], and on screen it’s artificial. There is a way to take things back. I think relying only on chemistry is lazy. There is writing. There is interaction. You can literally be guided through it.”
Watts took the floor again to confess that, in her early days, she was never able to give her best in auditions. On the contrary, she felt “incredibly terrible” and, at the same time, she often perceived a hostile atmosphere around her.
I could feel the energy in the room where people were saying, ‘Hurry up.’ Like, ‘Yeah, don’t worry, I’ll get you out of the way in a second. You don’t even have to look me in the eye and shake my hand.’
A white fly, in this sense, it was David Lynch. The director, with Mulholland Drive, gave Naomi Watts one of the most complex and incisive roles of her career. Come on casting, the actress understood that she was dealing with a special person, completely different from the others even in her approach. “She said, ‘Tell me about yourself.’ And I fell for it, in this conversation I was like, ‘Wait, do you really want to spend time with me? You want to know a little bit about me and how I grew up and everything?’ And then I got the job, I didn’t even have to audition.”
