When Roger Moore had a raging fight with his James Bond co-star right before a sex scene
There’s probably no ideal time to have a furious confrontation with a co-star, but Roger Moore can attest to the fact that he certainly found the worst time to do it.
By the time Moore made 1985’s A View to a Kill, he was 57 years old and had been playing suave superspy James Bond for 12 long years. This entry was his seventh outing, and mercifully for the actor and audience alike, it would also prove to be his last.
The film saw the villainous industrialist Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) plot to flood and destroy Silicon Valley, thereby giving his company a monopoly on microchip manufacture, which isn’t exactly the most exacting supervillain scheme in the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the movie wound up being one of the worst Bond entries ever.
In the film’s reviews, Moore was raked over the coals for still choosing to cavort around as Bond at his advanced age, which couldn’t really be hidden with Hollywood smoke and mirrors anymore. However, the actor himself hated the movie too, admitting that he was horrified when he found out his main Bond girl’s (Tanya Roberts) mother was younger than him. He also took issue with the level of violence depicted by Zorin, who was “machine-gunning hundreds of people”. To Moore, that wasn’t what a Bond movie should be, and he lamented, “You didn’t dwell on the blood and the brains spewing all over the place.”
Perhaps Moore knew he was too old for this shit from the moment he stepped on set, or the movie’s ultra-violence aggravated him as the shoot rolled along, and it made him grumpy. However, there was something else that bugged him on-set, and it caused him to lose a lot of sleep. You see, Moore liked to squeeze in a nap or two into his shooting schedule, as it kept him fresh for Bond’s physical exertions. To his dismay, though, co-star Grace Jones didn’t care about his beauty sleep, and routinely played wall-shaking rock music in her dressing room, which kept him awake.
Now, this would make anyone irate, no matter their age, but for a guy who was pushing 60, it was beyond the pale. In his memoir My Word is My Bond, Moore grumbled, “An afternoon nap was out of the question. I did ask her several times to turn it down, to no avail.” Over time, it boiled Moore’s blood so much that one day, he admitted he snapped and made a bit of a scene. “I marched into her room, yanked the plug out, and then flung a chair at the wall,” he admitted. “The dent is still there.”
After this outburst, Jones – a statuesque model and pop star who transitioned to film with Conan the Destroyer in ‘84 – didn’t play her loud music anymore. However, the atmosphere on-set turned decidedly frosty, which wasn’t good for one very specific reason: she and Moore were due to shoot a love scene very soon after his goddamn chair-hurling shenanigans. Naturally, the entire cast and crew waited with bated breath to see how this scene would play out with two stars who weren’t exactly on the best of terms.
A deathly silence fell over the set on the fateful day Moore and Jones “slipped between the sheets” to shoot what could turn into the most awkward, hostile sex scene in history. To his surprise, though, when he looked down, he saw Jones had brought “an enormous black sex toy” with her. The sight of this, ahem, large member made both of them burst into hysterics, and all of a sudden, all the tension in the air dissipated.
Ultimately, Jones’ stunt charmed Moore, and they were able to shoot the scene with no issues. She later revealed they got along like a house on fire from that point on, smiling, “He was very funny, always telling jokes and always making me laugh.” On top of that, she acknowledged his humour was “quite attractive.” Not bad for an old guy in desperate need of some shut-eye.
