Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke are looking back on their time filming “Great Expectations.”
The pair, who starred together in Alfonso Cuarón’s 1998 film adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, recently reunited to discuss the movie and the one scene that Paltrow refused to do.
“Do you remember Alfonso pitching you the love scene?” Hawke, 55, asked Paltrow, 53, during a video for Vanity Fair published on Dec. 17.
The scene in question, which never came to be, would have seen Paltrow’s character Estella receive oral sex from Hawke’s Finnegan.
“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, my father’s going to have a heart attack,’” the “Shakespeare in Love” star recalled.
Hawke went on to detail how the film’s director pitched the sex scene idea to him and Paltrow 27 years ago.
“The camera is 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,” Cuarón, 64, said at the time. “And then when you reach ecstasy, the light will explode like the sun!”
But that was when the “Se7en” star put her foot down on the idea.
“And I remember looking at Gwyneth, and Gwyneth is like, ‘Alfonso, I’m never going to do that,’” Hawke recalled, as Paltrow laughed beside him.
Paltrow acknowledged that she felt “really self-conscious about my dad and grandfather seeing this kind of stuff” during her early Hollywood career, and it “really bothered” her.
“Now, I wouldn’t care,” she added.
Still, the “Before Sunrise” actor praised his former co-star for the way she handled the situation.
“You had an awareness of the way that the business works, and the ways in which those kinds of images could be manipulated and what it meant to your dad,” Hawke noted.
Elsewhere during their chat, Paltrow and Hawke touched up on their careers nearly 30 years after the release of “Great Expectations.”
Hawke’s latest film, “Blue Moon,” was released on Oct. 24 and stars the Golden Globe nominee as Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart.
Paltrow, meanwhile, portrays Kay Stone opposite Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser in the newly released ping-pong drama “Marty Supreme.”
“We were two extremely idealistic young people who had a great vision for what we wanted to do and how we wanted to contribute,” Hawke shared. “And you were never ordinary. You’ve always been you.”
“I think we are fundamentally very much the same people,” Paltrow echoed. “I think we have had these lives that have taken all kinds of twists and turns, but I think we’ve both remained true to ourselves and who we are.”
Unlike “Great Expectations,” “Marty Supreme” includes several sex scenes between Paltrow and her 30-year-old co-star.
The Oscar winner opened up those scenes and the nearly 24-year age gap between her and Chalamet during another chat with Vanity Fair earlier this year.
“I was like, ‘Okay, great. I’m 109 years old. You’re 14,” she told the outlet in March. “We have a lot of sex in this movie.”
“I mean, we have a lot of sex in this movie,” Paltrow added. “There’s a lot – a lot.”
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