Jennifer Grey admits to ‘smoking a lot of weed’ before sex scene with a drunk Patrick Swayze in Red Dawn

Jennifer Gray and Patrick Swayze smouldered on the big screen in Dirty Dancing, but an earlier project saw the two test their chemistry for the first time.

The A Real Pain actress, 64, has revealed that her and Swayze’s first love scene fizzled rather than fizzled.

The two worked on 1984’s Red Dawn, an action film about a group of teenagers who take to the mountains and fight back after a Soviet invasion of the US that hit their small Colorado town.

The script called for a sex scene between lead actor Swayze and relative newcomer Gray.

“As an actor, you look at all your stuff in the script and you’re like, ‘Okay. I run. I shoot. I run. I throw hand grenades.’ I’ll kill myself with a hand grenade. But this is the only acting scene I get to do where I don’t do any action,” she said The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast.

She said the sex scene was “one of the more tender scenes, which, I thought, was part of the reason I wanted to do this work.”

However, when it came time to actually do the deed, the veteran actress revealed that her co-star was drunk.

“We were in a sleeping bag, you know, and he was nervous or whatever, and he came into the sleeping bag drunk,” she explained.

She said the actor “didn’t know his lines. And then it was cut. And they said, “We’ll come back and shoot it again.” But of course they didn’t.’

Gray explained that the situation was not helped by the fact that she was also “smoking a lot of weed at the time.”

“And so I was super paranoid and I was scared. I didn’t sleep all night. So when I went in to film my big love scene, my big… romantic scene with him, I was so angry because, you know, I was all smug.”

“Keep in mind that I am a super young actor,” she added. ‘[I was] really taking everything seriously, and maybe a little annoying… because I want to do it right.’

The actress revealed that some of her co-stars played pranks on her during the shoot, including putting “firecrackers in my door.”

In the podcast conversation, Gray recalled meeting Swayze again prior to a screen test for Dirty Dancing.

Gray and Swayze had worked together as teenagers against the Soviet invasion of the US, which included their small Colorado town, in 1984’s Red Dawn. They were supposed to shoot a sex scene, but Gray said Swayze showed up drunk and didn’t know his lines

The actress revealed that she was also “smoking a lot of weed at the time” and was “super paranoid, and I was scared.” I haven’t slept all night.’ The scene was cut from the film (seen here with Lea Thomspon, Doug Toby, Charlie Sheen, Swayze, C. Thomas Howell and Brad Savage)

Gray admitted that she was hesitant to work with Swayze on Dirty Dancing because he and some of her other Red Dawn co-stars fooled her during the film’s production, but were convinced during their screen test together. “He took me in his arms and I thought, ‘Oh boy, I’m ready.'”

“He pulled me down the hall and told me, ‘I love you, I love you, and I’m so sorry. And I know you don’t want me to do the movie,'” Gray has said of the interaction. .

‘And he had tears in his eyes. And it brought tears to my eyes – not for the same reason. I thought, “Oh, this guy works with me.” And he says, “We could kill it – we could kill it if we did this.”

She said Swayze, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2009 at age 57, convinced her after they began the screen test, explaining, “We go in there and he takes me in his arms and I’m like, ‘ Oh, boy. I ‘I’m ready.”‘

Dirty Dancing was a huge success, with the small-budget film grossing around $214 million at the box office.