The 1991 scene Jennifer Connelly regretted shooting: “That wasn’t something I felt comfortable about”
Labyrinth is one of the best movies of the 1980s because it’s got everything, from a gripping plot and fun songs to enduring characters and David Bowie‘s crotch, and you can hardly ask for more.
The story revolves around a girl named Sarah, played by a young Jennifer Connelly, who, after her baby brother is kidnapped by an evil Bowie goblin king, ventures to a magical realm in order to rescue him, making for pure fantasy escapism, and I treasure it deeply.
Though Connelly had appeared in movies before, like Once Upon a Time in America a few years earlier, Labyrinth is what put her on the map. She was just 15 years old when the movie came out, and although the Jim Henson-directed adventure wasn’t an initial hit, it confirmed that she could lead a film all by herself.
Roles in The Rocketeer and The Hot Spot followed, but she still couldn’t quite crack the upper echelons of Hollywood, which led to a few years in which the teenage star found herself in limbo, and while she was trying to establish herself, she was also studying English literature at Yale University, which coincided with the release of her film Career Opportunities. The John Hughes-directed romantic comedy saw her play a young woman who yearns to escape from her rich, but abusive family, falling in love with a local Target employee named Jim, played by Frank Whaley, where the two dream of running away together to leave their troubles behind.
Unfortunately for Connelly, Career Opportunities led to a rather embarrassing crossover between her personal and professional lives. “One of my professors came up to me at school and said, ‘Jennifer, Jennifer, I went to the movies the other day, and I saw this… poster of you’,” she told Rolling Stone in 1990, “’This sort of… life-size mechanical poster of you’.”
The poster in question was actually quite infamous, featuring Connelly’s character riding a mechanical horse with Whaley’s character watching on in amazement. There’s nothing wrong with that on the surface, but when you combine it with the text that was underneath…
“The ad line goes something like ‘He’s about to have the ride of his life!’” the Oscar winner reiterated with a sense of horror, “I don’t know about anyone else, but that wasn’t something I felt all that comfortable about. That sure as hell wasn’t a subject that I was dying to learn about from my professor.”
Connelly’s body and the horrendous sexualisation it was inundated with as a young woman were a major talking point at the time and are shocking to look back on now.
Trying to balance a normal life with fame and fortune is one of the worst things about being a child star, as many of them have confirmed, but being a young woman in the spotlight, especially one who was so routinely objectified by studios and the press, is even harder. Connelly eventually came out of the other side of this difficult period of her life, but she probably never looked at a merry-go-round the same way again.
