The “pompous” co-star Audrey Hepburn hated working with: “She didn’t like him at all”
While directors try their best to cast onscreen duos with natural sparks, sometimes that explodes in their face, leading to some infamous stories of cinematic pairings who actually hated each other off-screen, but surely it’s a testament to the actor’s talent to push through it, like Audrey Hepburn’s ability to look in love with a man she couldn’t stand.
Especially in the world of romance, it truly all comes down to the energy shared between a film’s two leads, wherein if the audience doesn’t buy into the emotions, the whole thing can come off as a fatal mismatch and go crashing down, but a perfect pairing can cover up all manner of sins.
There are plenty of rom-coms out there with absolutely awful scripts or plotlines that succeed simply because the chemistry between the couple carries it all. Just look at basically any Nora Ephron movie where a truly insane plotline, usually involving some amount of stalking or a huge dose of coincidence, is glossed over due to the infectious, blush-inducing energy between her two leads.
When things go right, it’s golden: think Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, who have so much chemistry they’ve been put together twice now, or Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, or Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, even Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in the Before trilogy, where their natural chemistry allows three films of predominantly chit chat to be endlessly romantic. Then there’s Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, who again have appeared in several movies together, with Hudson dubbing her co-star, “one of my great loves”.
The rare and golden middle ground, however, is the instances where maybe two co-stars aren’t getting on, but they simply make it work. Who would have ever guessed that behind the scenes of The Notebook, one of the best romance movies ever made, with some of the most heart-aching onscreen chemistry, Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling did not get on, with the latter asking for someone else to be brought in to read lines with him because he felt he couldn’t even rehearse with his co-star. Later, that tension would lead to a relationship between the two, but during filming, the atmosphere was quite frosty.
While filming Lost In Translation, Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray didn’t get on, and there are reports that while playing literature’s most famous tragic lovers in Romeo and Juliet, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes didn’t see eye to eye either, and way back in the 1960s, Audrey Hepburn was having to work hard on the set of Breakfast At Tiffany’s to seem interested in a man she didn’t like.
“I must say there wasn’t a human being that Audrey Hepburn didn’t have a kind word for except George Peppard,” one of the film’s producers, George Shepherd, admitted. While Hepburn and Peppard are heavenly onscreen as the friends-to-lovers duo of Holly Golightly and Paul Varkaj, the truth was that the pair didn’t bond at all.
He thought she was stuck up and prudish, and she thought he was arrogant; for a woman known for her good will and kindness, the people on set saw a rare moment of animosity from Hepburn as Shepherd said, “She didn’t like him at all. She thought he was pompous. When she wasn’t around, he referred to her as ‘The Happy Nun’”.
No one would ever guess from the film, as Hepburn’s Golightly looks at Varjak with love, playing perfectly their complex connection as a testament to her ability to act through any amount of distaste.
