George Clooney and Julia Roberts apparently let their longtime platonic friendship get in the way of a kissing scene in their new romantic comedy, “Ticket to Paradise.”
The two told The New York Times in a story published Monday that it took a staggering number of takes to capture the smooch.
“One kiss,” Roberts said. “And we did it for, like, six months.”
“Yeah,” Clooney added, “I told my wife, ‘It took 80 takes.’ She was like, ‘What the hell?’”
“It took 79 takes of us laughing and then the one take of us kissing,” Roberts recalled.
“Well, we had to get it right,” Clooney explained.
Clooney and Roberts appeared together in “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001), “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (2002), “Ocean’s Twelve” (2004) and “Money Monster” (2016), but “Ticket to Paradise” marks their first romantic comedy together. While the two played exes in the “Ocean’s” heist-comedy ensembles, their relationship was not the focus.
In the forthcoming movie, the two play bitter exes who scheme to stop the marriage of their daughter to a seaweed farmer. It’s due out Oct. 21.
Roberts joked earlier about expectations for the film.
“I think it’s so funny and George is so funny and George and I together, it’s probably going to be terrible because there’s too much potential for it to be great, it’ll just implode on it itself,” Roberts told Variety in May.
“I think that should be the commercial for the movie: ‘It’s probably going to be terrible.’ I’m so glad my publicist is on a plane right now.”