Brooke Shields berates Endless Love director who grabbed and twisted her TOE so she could pull ‘ecstasy face’ during a defloration scene aged just 15 – and bashes Blue Lagoon director for trying to ‘sell her own sexual awakening’
- Brooke Shields said Endless Love director Franco Zeffirelli’s behavior made her uncomfortable while shooting the film when she was just 15 years old
- She also accused the producers of Blue Lagoon of exploiting her sexuality
- Her comments come in Shield’s new documentary released April 3 on Hulu
Brooke Shields recalled with disgust how the director of Endless Love twisted her train during a sex scene to try and pull an “ecstasy face” when she was just 15 years old.
In her new documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, the actress said that director Franco Zeffirelli’s behavior on set made her so uncomfortable that she had to “dissociate” from herself for the rest of the production.
She also shared the experience of working on The Blue Lagoon – the story of a young boy and girl’s sexual awakening – when she was just 14, and criticized the production team for trying to make the film a “reality show”. make by concentrating strongly. about her own sexuality.
Throughout the documentary, Shields, 57, discussed how she was sexualized in the media as a young girl and throughout her teens, and reflected on how that affected her life.
The two-part documentary was released on Hulu on April 3.
Brooke Shields appears in her new Hulu documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields
Brooke Shields appears at just 14 years old in The Blue Lagoon, a movie where she was naked the entire time
On the set of Endless Love, Shields said Zeffirelli exploited her sexuality equally.
“The physicality and the exploration of sexuality felt really dangerous to me,” she said. “I didn’t trust the director to create a safe environment for me.”
She said this culminated in the shooting of the scene where her character loses her virginity — a sex scene she was already uncomfortable with — when Zeffirelli violently twisted her toe to force her to make a face that resembled “I had a feeling of, kind of, I think, ecstasy.’
“His thing was ‘the look on your face, it must be ecstasy,'” she said. “But it was more fear than anything because he hurt me.”
“I thought I was myself as the workhorse kind of thing. It was a transaction,” she said.
“I didn’t want to seem stupid or untalented, so I just distanced myself,” she recalls. “You instantly become a vapor of yourself around something that happens to you.”
Shields said that after that incident, she “shut down” the set for the rest of production.
Brooke Shields with Endless Love director Franco Zeffirelli. She was only 15 in the movie
Brooke Shields appears in Endless Love. She was only 15 years old when the movie was shot
Although only 14 years old during the filming of The Blue Lagoon, Shields was no stranger to being sexualized after playing a prostitute in the 1978 film Pretty Baby at just 11 years old. Before that, at just 10 years old, she was also photographed nude in a Playboy publication.
By the time she reached the Blue Lagoon set – a movie famous for its ubiquitous nudity – Shields remembered how director Randal Kleiser was determined to exploit that sexualized image by making it seem as if she as a person was experiencing a sexual awakening. experienced at the same time as the character. she portrayed.
The documentary quoted Kleiser telling a newspaper, “It’s real, she changes from a child to a woman during the filming.”
Shields expressed her disgust at Kleiser’s intentions.
“They wanted to turn it into a reality show,” she said. “They wanted to sell my actual sexual awakening.”