Reese Witherspoon refused to film a sex scene with Vince Vaughn in Four Christmases because she hated him so much.
Being a rom-com, Four Christmases offers all the happy holiday cheer you can hope for from a festive movie.
As Vaughn and Witherspoon’s characters find themselves traipsing around four different parents’ homes for the holidays, the pair realise they couldn’t possibly live without each other, before finding their happy ending with a new baby girl.
Apologies for any spoilers, but the film’s a decade old, if you’ve not seen it by now you probably never will.
Anyway, while their characters were madly in love, the actors portraying them were the very opposite. While no one is exactly sure of the reason behind their feud, the pair couldn’t stand each other.
Sources from the set of the film leaked gossip about the Hollywood stars, where it sounded like they clashed a lot with their acting styles.
An insider told The Daily News:
Vince rolls onto set in the morning looking like he just came in from a night out, while Reese will arrive early looking camera-ready.
Then Reese tries to force Vince into blocking out each scene and running through their lines as Vince tries to convince her that he’s an ad-libber and wants to play around and see where the scene goes.
While they obviously managed to work around these differences to produce the movie, there was one scene that just couldn’t overcome the pair’s hatred for each other.
Witherspoon reportedly refused outright to take part in a sex scene with her co-star, which resulted in it having to be cut from the film entirely.
A source explained the situation to the New York Post, as reported in Digital Spy:
Reese has an issue with the scripted love scene. It is meant to be a funny, American Pie-style romp, full of bumps and laughs, but Reese is of such a prude, she thinks it’s just too much.
You’d think Witherspoon would have just turned the part down if her dislike ran so deep she wouldn’t film scripted scenes, but I imagine the pay made it worth the pain of working with someone she hated for so long.
After the actor turned her back on the scene, Vaughn seemed to retaliate by turning his back on the promotion of the film. Lainey Gossip explained Witherspoon had been doing much of the press tour alone, and presumably having seen enough of her face for a while, Vaughn didn’t even turn up to the film’s premiere.
Still, according to Box Office Mojo, the film pulled in $163,733,697 worldwide, so at least something good came out of it.
If anything, the hatred for one another just serves as a merit to their acting skills, because it obviously didn’t taint the quality of their performances so much that it ruined the film.
It’s probably best they just avoid going for the same movies from now on.
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Emily Brown first began delivering important news stories aged just 13, when she launched her career with a paper round. She graduated with a BA Hons in English Language in the Media from Lancaster University, and went on to become a freelance writer and blogger. Emily contributed to The Sunday Times Travel Magazine and Student Problems before becoming a journalist at UNILAD, where she works on breaking news as well as longer form features.