Jennifer Grey Recalls 'Smoking a Lot of Weed' Before Sex Scene with a Drunk Patrick Swayze inRed Dawn

Mar. 15, 2025

Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey in 1984’s “Red Dawn.".Photo:Alamy

Alamy

“We were in this, you know, sleeping bag, and he was nervous or whatever, and he came into the sleeping bag drunk,” Grey, 64, told host Scott Feinberg on the Dec. 20 episode ofThe Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatterpodcast.

In the action film, Grey, Swayze,Lea Thompson,Charlie Sheen,C. Thomas Howelland others, play teenagers that retreat to the mountains as they launch a counter-attack against a Russian-led invasion in their Colorado town.

Jennifer Grey in 2024.Noam Galai/Getty

Noam Galai/Getty

“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 of the sex scene, calling it “one of the more tender scenes which was, I thought, part of the reason I wanted to do the job.”

However, she said Swayze — whodied in 2009 at age 57from pancreatic cancer — “didn’t know his lines. And then it got cut. And they said, ‘We’ll come back and reshoot it.’ But, of course, they didn’t.” She also shared that her costars would “put firecrackers in my door … to prank me.”

“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.”

Jennifer Grey, Patrick Swayze in “Dirty Dancing.".Alamy

She did share, “keep in mind, I’m super young actor … really taking everything seriously, and maybe a little annoying … because I wanna do good.”

Grey previously shared that before they went on to costar in the now-iconic 1987 hitDirty Dancing,Swayze apologizedfor the on-set pranks during their screen test.

“He pulled me down the hall and said to me, ‘I love you, I love you, and I’m so sorry. And I know you don’t want me to do the movie,’ " Grey has said. “And he got the tears in his eyes. And I got the tears in my eyes — not for the same reason. I was like, ‘Oh, this guy’s working me.’ And he goes, ‘We could kill it — we could kill it if we did this.’ "

But once they went into the screen test, Grey recalled: “We go in there and he takes me in his arms and I was like, ‘Oh, boy. I’m done.’ "

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source: people.com