Denzel Washington Refused To Shoot These Scenes With Julia Roberts

Decades before Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones made headlines by not kissing at the end of “Twisters,” another big screen non-kiss was the talk of Hollywood. In the 1993 film “The Pelican Brief,” two stars who were skyrocketing to fame shared plenty of screen time and chemistry, but no climactic kiss.

Denzel Washington starred opposite Julia Roberts in the big screen adaptation of John Grisham’s legal thriller novel. “The Pelican Brief” was the last film ever written and directed by “Klute” and “All the President’s Men” filmmaker Alan J. Pakula, and it was a box office hit despite earning mixed reviews from critics. One point of contention? The lack of lip-locking closure between the two main characters, a decision that would be talked about extensively in the press –- especially once they caught wind of the reason an apparently planned kiss scene got axed.

In an interview with Newsweek from 2002, Roberts admitted that she was still getting hounded about the kiss that wasn’t years after the fact. “I have taken so much s–t over the years about not kissing Denzel in that film,” Roberts told the outlet. “Don’t I have a pulse? Of course I wanted to kiss Denzel. It was his idea to take the damn scenes out.” The reason, according to Roberts, was that Washington didn’t want to alienate the Black women who loved him with an interracial kiss.

“Black women are not often seen as objects of desire on film,” he’s quoted as saying in the Newsweek piece. “They have always been my core audience.” He recalled a test screening he attended for the 1989 crime movie “The Mighty Quinn,” in which his character Xavier Quinn shared a smooch with Mimi Rogers’ character. Apparently, the Black women in the audience booed loudly, and it sounds like the moment may have shaped the way the actor saw himself as a romantic lead on screen. Still, Washington told Newsweek there were a few reasons the scene got deleted, including but not limited to his not wanting to offend Black women.

According to the book “Exploring Black Sexuality” by Robert Staples, this wasn’t actually the first time Washington refused to engage in a kissing scene with a co-star. “Earlier, a white actress named Kelly Lynch claims she got down on her knees and begged Washington to have their characters kiss in a film,” Staples wrote. That time, the author says, Washington thought white men watching the movie would be unhappy seeing him kiss a white woman. A quote from an issue of the Weekly World News in 1998 partly backs that story up, with Washington’s “Virtuosity” costar Lynch telling the outlet that “Denzel felt strongly that white males, who were the target audience of the movie, would not want to see him kiss a white woman.”

As much as audiences today may want to pretend that interracial romance on screen was a settled topic by the ’90s, coverage from the time seems to indicate otherwise. A Jet magazine article from 1998 mentions the “Virtuosity” anecdote in an article titled “Is It Still Taboo For Blacks And Whites To Kiss In Movies?” The article notes that actors like Wesley Snipes and Laurence Fishburne were “braving these roles” at the time, while movies like “The Pelican Brief” and the Morgan Freeman-Ashley Judd thriller “Kiss the Girls” toned down or eliminated the affection between characters who were into one another in the source material.

The Jet article also gives more context to Washington’s thoughts on the matter, with the actor recalling that it was both Black women and white men who “hated” his interracial kiss scene in “The Mighty Quinn,” and a woman in the audience also shouted “Denzel, you promised!” He’s quoted explaining his thought process behind his rejection of certain love scenes to the Chicago-Sun Times: “It goes to show you that when the audience sees a love scene on film, they put themselves up there. It’s like Tom Cruise or Denzel is kissing you. So in a certain way, I belong to these women, and they had a spontaneous reaction to the kiss.”

So, has Washington kept up his no-kiss policy in the years since “The Pelican Brief”? If anything, he may have broadened it. Regardless of the race of his co-star, the actor has actually rarely kissed anyone on screen at all, especially in the decades since “The Pelican Brief.” One memorable exception is “Abbott Elementary” star Sheryl Lee Ralph, who did get to share a kiss with the actor back in the ’80s while filming “The Mighty Quinn.” As for her review of the big romantic moment? She says it was “[even] better than you think.”