The reason Denzel Washington refused to kiss Julia Roberts: “Of course I wanted to kiss him”
Movie kisses are as much a part of cinema culture as car chases and crappy tie-in merchandise. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford in The Empire Strikes Back. Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain. These are just a small sample of the plethora of fantastic film lip-locks from across the decades, but one of the great movie kisses that never happened involved Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts.
The two icons starred in 1993’s The Pelican Brief, a legal thriller adapted from the John Grisham novel of the same name. Roberts plays Darby Shaw, a brilliant law student, whilst Washington plays intrepid reporter Gray Grantham. They are both involved in the case of a man who murdered two Supreme Court justices. The two actors have a sizzling chemistry and their characters get together in the book, but their relationship on-screen is left much more vague. According to Roberts, this was all Washington’s doing.
In a conversation with Newsweek, the Erin Brockovitch actor explained that she was very keen on following up on the book’s romance angle. “I have taken so much shit over the years about not kissing Denzel in that film,” Roberts said of The Pelican Brief. “Don’t I have a pulse? Of course, I wanted to kiss Denzel. It was his idea to take the damn scenes out.”
The reason why Washington asked for there to be no romance scenes between him and Roberts is actually a very sad one. In 1989, the Training Day star appeared in a film called The Mighty Quinn, where his love interest was played by white actor Mimi Rogers. In the original cut of the movie, he and Rogers shared a kiss, but the audience was so incensed at seeing an interracial couple on screen that they booed.
Washington asked the studio to remove the kiss and decided that, since viewers didn’t want to see him with a White woman and (in his words), “Black women are not often seen as objects of desire on film,” he wouldn’t be doing any more love scenes ever again. This is what prompted his decision on The Pelican Brief.
This shocking revelation seems completely unfathomable by modern standards, but 1993 was still a very long way off where we are now. Washington asked for another interracial kiss, this time with Kelly Lynch, to be cut from his 1995 movie Virtuosity, saying, “White men bring women to movies, and they don’t want to watch a Black man with their woman.” Even in 2012, when Washington kissed white actor Kelly Reilly in the movie Flight, there was major discussion about it online and in print, including an article in The Washington Post.
In Grisham’s book, both Gray and Darby are White, so Washington’s issues lay solely with the big screen version. At the end of the novel, the two lovers end the story together on a remote island, while in the film, Gray conducts a TV interview where he refers to “his source” (Darby) as “too good to be true.”
According to Roberts, who spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the movie, this confirmed to her that the two characters are in a relationship. “In slow motion, I put my head down with my cheeks pink, and that says it all to me,” she revealed. “I think he’s in love with her. She’s in love with him.”
