“Wild Things” would have included a sex scene between Matt Dillon and Kevin Bacon if one of them hadn’t refused to film it, the director says
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The 1998 movie Wild Things almost featured a sex scene between Kevin Bacon and Matt Dillon.
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According to director John McNaughton, it never happened because an actor refused to film it.
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“You win some, you lose some,” McNaughton said of the scrapped scene.
“Wild Things” almost contained a sex scene between Kevin Bacon and Matt Dillon, but the moment was scrapped when one of them refused to film it, the director said.
Speaking to Ethan Alter for Yahoo News on the 25th anniversary of the 1998 cult classic, director John McNaughton recalled one of the most surprising moments in the original screenplay that was never filmed.
Wild Things, which also stars Neve Campbell and Denise Richards, follows a police officer who uncovers a conspiracy in a case in which a school counselor was raped by two female students.
The film has several twists. However, one of the most shocking moments screenwriter Stephen Peters originally included was a sex scene between Dillon’s and Bacon’s characters after it was revealed that the couple were conspiring against the two young women.
“In the original version of the scene, Matt goes into his bathroom to take a shower and there’s Kevin,” McNaughton said. “They should look you up and down and then wham – here we go.”
But it never happened because one of them refused to film the scene as originally written. According to Alter, McNaughton refused to say who. Representatives for Dillon and Bacon did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
“I love surprises and I love things I don’t see coming,” he said. “But in that moment it was like, ‘You win something, you lose something; we continue.'”
Dillon told Total Film in 2005 that he was “relieved” when the scene was cut, while Bacon told the publication the twist would have been “great” and eventually blamed the film’s financiers for taking it out since he believed they “didn’t do it. I don’t like the idea of men making out.”
McNaughton made several other revelations elsewhere in the Yahoo interview, including that Marvel star Robert Downey Jr. was originally set to play Dillon’s character.
According to the director, they eventually went over Downey Jr. with Dillon, partly because his drug problems at the time made him liable for studio production and partly because they couldn’t strike a deal with his representatives.
Looking back, McNaughton said he believed the right actor got the role.
“As my dear mother used to say, ‘Everything happens for a reason,'” he said.
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