Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze’s sex scene in “Red Dawn” never made the 1984 film due to overdoing it on some substances.
On Dec. 20, Grey was a guest on “The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter” podcast and recalled smoking “a lot of weed” prior to filming the scene with a drunk Swayze.
“We were in this, you know, sleeping bag, and he was nervous or whatever, and he came into the sleeping bag drunk,” Grey told host Scott Feinberg.
In “Red Dawn,” Grey, Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson and C. Thomas Howell star as teenagers who head to the mountains to plan a counter-attack against a Russian-led invasion.
“As an actor, you’re looking at all your stuff in the script, and you’re like, okay. I’m running. I’m shooting. I’m running. I’m throwing hand grenades. I’m killing myself with a hand grenade. But this is the only acting scene I get to do where I’m not doing action,” Grey said of the sex scene.
She called the shot “one of the more tender scenes which was, I thought, part of the reason I wanted to do the job.”
Grey noted that Swayze “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.”
The actress said that her costars “put firecrackers in my door … to prank me.”
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“I was smoking a lot of weed in those days, too,” Grey explained. “And so, I was super paranoid, and I was scared. I didn’t sleep the whole night. So when I went in to shoot my big love scene, my big … romantic scene with him, I was so angry because I was, you know, all self-righteous.”
Grey wanted listeners to “keep in mind, I’m super young actor … really taking everything seriously, and maybe a little annoying … because I wanna do good.”
After starring in “Red Dawn” together, Grey and Swayze appeared in the 1987 film, “Dirty Dancing.”
Swayze passed away in 2009 at 57 from pancreatic cancer. In April, Swayze’s widow, Lisa Niemi Swayze, shared how she felt in the moments after learning her husband had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
While speaking to People about her partnership with the non-profit organization Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, Lisa went into detail about what her frame of mind was like when she heard her husband’s diagnosis.
“It was the worst night of my life,” she told the outlet. “I know [Patrick] said, ‘I’m a dead man,’ but for me even, that night, I slept in the hospital room with him on the cot. I felt like a nail was being hammered into my own coffin. Your life turns on a dime, and there’s no escaping the reality of what that diagnosis means. It’s just awful. It’s just a dreadful moment.”
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Lisa went on to explain that by the time Patrick was diagnosed, “it was impossible to turn around.” She added they were happy “he miraculously managed to survive 22 months after that.”
Lisa explained “one of the things that got [her] through” the period of time following Patrick’s death in September 2009 was the constant reminder to herself that “people do this all the time.”
“And that’s as painful as it is because I thought, ‘This is going to kill me. Grief is going to kill me,’” she told People. “But you know what? It doesn’t kill everybody. If they can do it, so can I.”
The five-year-survival rate for pancreatic cancer has risen to 13%, according to the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Facts & Figures 2024. However, Lisa says, “we’ve got to do better than that.”
