“A huge turn-on”: the 1999 scene Angelina Jolie called “the best sex I ever had in a movie”
There are a thousand different ways to shoot a sex scene, not all of them good, but one particular sequence will stay with Angelina Jolie as the best she’s ever had in a movie.
Now, that may set your mind racing, among other things, since she’s performed a few of them. Her collaboration with Antonio Banderas in Original Sin was overflowing with the stuff, which sizzled so much that, as often tends to be the case, the co-stars were accused of having a real-life affair.
They weren’t, and Jolie was furious that it had even been suggested, but that’s chemistry for you. The Academy Award winner also sizzled onscreen with Brad Pitt in Mr & Mrs Smith, and everyone knows how that worked out, but her efforts opposite Ethan Hawke in Taking Lives were a significantly damper squib.
She’s also performed nude in Hackers and Cyborg 2, among others, so it’s not unreasonable to think that the actor’s favourite act of fictional fornication was a hot, heavy, and seductive moment. However, it was almost the complete opposite of that, which is the very reason why Jolie became so fond of it.
In almost every movie, if you pair one attractive star up with another and present them as platonic partners, romance is expected to blossom. Instead, when Jolie and Denzel Washington top-lined the cast of 1999’s The Bone Collector, that was completely off the table from the start, since the latter’s character is a quadriplegic. And yet, the stars still managed to form an intimate connection.
Jolie landed the part after earning Washington’s personal seal of approval, and as much as there’s no physical connection between them in the conventional sense, her Amelia Donaghy and his Lincoln Rhyme do more with brief glances, eye contact, and the subtle brushing of her finger against his than any gratuitous sex scene could ever hope to accomplish.
“What’s fascinating are the journeys these two characters undertake, and the deep relationship that evolves between them,” she explained. To illustrate that point, the palpable tension between Donaghy and Rhyme was so strong that, without having to do the deed, Jolie called it “The best sex I ever had in a movie.”
As counterproductive as it may sound, she was much more enamoured to find herself in a sex scene without simulated shagging, because the dynamic between the characters made it ten times more titillating than it would have been under the usual filmic factory settings for fucking. “It was great seducing someone with your mind,” Jolie offered, adding for emphasis, “A huge turn-on.”
Some viewers wouldn’t even necessarily look at The Bone Collector as a love story, although the title could easily be ripped off for a low-rent porno if your mind was deep enough in the gutter, but for Jolie, the bond between the two leads wasn’t quite better than sex, but clearly equivalent to the real thing.
