Jennifer Grey recently shared what was really going on behind the scenes of her 1984 action flick Red Dawn, where she first met her future Dirty Dancing co-star Patrick Swayze.
The actress revealed during a recent episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast that she and Swayze got to test out their chemistry while filming a sex scene for Red Dawn that ultimately got caught from the final version. But they had quite a bit of trouble while filming it.
“We were in this, you know, sleeping bag, and he was nervous or whatever, and he came into the sleeping bag drunk,” she said, before later adding that she had also been “smoking a lot of weed in those days.”
Later in the podcast, she also mentioned that she remembered feeling “so angry” during the scene because the cast kept pranking her by putting firecrackers in her door.
Red Dawn starred Grey and Swayze alongside Lea Thompson, C. Thomas Howell, and Charlie Sheen as a gang of teenagers fighting to protect a small Colorado town from invading Soviet forces during a fictional World War III.
“I was smoking a lot of weed in those days, too,” she added. “And so, I was super paranoid, and I was scared. I didn’t sleep the whole night. So when I went in to shoot my big love scene, my big … romantic scene with him, I was so angry because I was, you know, all self-righteous.”
Grey explained that she was looking forward to filming the scene with Swayze because it stood out in the action-packed script.
“As an actor, you’re looking at all your stuff in the script, and you’re like, okay. I’m running. I’m shooting. I’m running. I’m throwing hand grenades. I’m killing myself with a hand grenade. But this is the only acting scene I get to do where I’m not doing action,” she said, adding that it was “one of the more tender scenes which was, I thought, part of the reason I wanted to do the job.”
But Swayze reportedly “didn’t know his lines,” according to Grey. The scene was ultimately cut from the film and they never reshot it.
Swayze later apologized to Grey for his behavior on Red Dawn when they crossed paths again during their Dirty Dancing screen test.
Grey recalled during an appearance on The View in 2022 that she and Swayze shared an emotional and tearful moment when he apologized in an effort to convince her to star opposite him.
“We go in there and he takes me in his arms and I was like, ‘Oh, boy. I’m done,’” she admitted.
