Matt Damon And Michael Douglas Mapped Out Their 'Behind The Candelabra' Love Scenes Like Football Plays

Matt Damon Kissing Michael Douglas Nudity Liberace Movie

Matt Damon says Michael Douglas is a "wonderful" kisser. He also tells Playboy magazine that he and the veteran actor strategized their onscreen make-out sessions for Steven Soderbergh's Liberace movie for HBO, Behind The Candelabra, "like a football plan," which scarily brings to mind John Madden and Al Michaels cavorting in Speedos while diagramming a play-action pass. 

CandelabraThe Promised Land actor tells interviewer Stephen Rebello that he usually says no to nude scenes, "but I just did a lot of it playing the long-term partner of Liberace, Scott Thorson in Behind the Candelabra."  He took the plunge, he explains, because Soderbergh, who directed Damon on the Oceans films and The Informant! was behind the camera and the scenes in question were "tastefully done." And, really, who could resist being held firmly in the masculine arms of the silver-maned actor who played Gordon Gekko?

Damon, who plays the much younger lover of the flamboyant piano showman — the Norman Jean Roy photograph above, which appeared in Vanity Fair, shows them in character — says the movie will make some people uncomfortable because "you're witnessing something really intimate you would normally see with a man and a woman, but instead it's two men".

He, on the other hand, found the dynamic "thrilling" even though some of the more intimate scenes weren't "the most natural thing in the world to do, though. Like, for one scene, I had to come out of a pool, go over to Michael, straddle him on a chaise longue and start kissing him. And throughout the script, it’s not like I kiss him just once. We drew it up like a football plan."

At least he didn't make a pitcher/catcher reference.

Damon goes on to say that he once asked the late Heath Ledger how he managed the scene with Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain where to two men hungrily suck face.  Ledger's response: "Well, mate, I drank half a case of beer in my trailer."  Damon add that when he laughed at that response, Ledger told him: “No, I’m serious. I needed to just go for it. If you can’t do that, you’re not making the movie.”

The conversation leads Rebello to ask Damon what it was like "when you and Ben Affleck were constantly asked if you were gay, back when you were starting your careers"

"I never denied those rumors because I was offended and didn’t want to offend my friends who were gay—as if being gay were some kind of fucking disease," Damon responds. "It put me in a weird position in that sense. The whole thing was just gross."

[Playboy]

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Comments

  • I'm thrilled this movie is finally coming out. My great uncle, founder and owner of the Maybelline Co from 1915 -1968 and his lifetime partner Emery Shaver had to live a cloistered life behind the gates of the Villa Valentino in the Hollywood Hills to protect Maybelline's reputation because they were Gay.
    Sharrie Williams author of The Maybelline Story

  • Whatever happened to fags just stayin in the closet? Go back under the rocks you crawled out from under. We've already got enough to awnser to god for.

    • Carol Hiller says:

      How masculine, John Garrison! Something tells me you have nothing personally on that list, except violation of the very minor "Love thy neighbor" suggestion, because you, sir are a Real Man. I'll bet my virginity you have dozens of nubile women aching to be your sex toys and learn all about what's wrong with the world at your masculine, masculine feet as well.