Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze are forever entrenched in the annals of romance cinema with their roles in Dirty Dancing. However, they would actually couple up a few years earlier in the action thriller Red Dawn in 1984. Grey would recently appear on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast and recount a time they were filming a scene where their characters were supposed to snuggle up in a sleeping bag and become intimate with each other. The chemistry between the two stars in their later provocative hit would resonate with audiences, but their first attempt to make love on screen became so anxiety-induced that Grey said Swayze had started the scene fairly inebriated.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Grey confessed, “We were in this, you know, sleeping bag and he, I guess, was nervous or whatever. 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.” Grey also admitted that her experience outside of the production contributed some stress for this shoot for some interesting reasons. She explained, “I was smoking a lot of weed in those days, too, and so I was super paranoid, and I was scared. 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?'”
She continued to expound that the situation snowballed, “I didn’t get to sleep, and I was anxious and felt like it was a problem. 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.'” Then, she concluded, “The whole thing was just — it was just not my scene, the whole movie. So I was trying to hang in there.”
The experience definitely put her off on the consideration of working with Swayze again for Dirty Dancing, “By the time that movie was over, I was like, ‘This guy is not professional. He is killing me.’ And then when they started talking about him for Dirty Dancing, I was like, ‘Oh, oh no, anybody but him.'”