Daryl Hannah Says She Skipped Kissing Tom Hanks in ‘Splash’ Rehearsals: ‘So Embarrassing’

The movie “Splash” was released 40 years ago on March 9, 1984, which prompted star Daryl Hannah to look back on her feelings around being nude on-screen and kissing Tom Hanks.

Hannah told People that despite her love for the movie, filming it wasn’t always comfortable. At 23, she “hadn’t really had a boyfriend yet” and was “incredibly anxious” about the film’s kissing and nude scenes. “That first time, when you don’t know somebody and you have to kiss them, is so embarrassing,” Hannah explained. Instead, Hannah would skip the kissing scenes in rehearsals until she felt ready to cross that barrier with a first kiss with her costar.

Hannah’s character Madison saves the life of a young boy, who falls in love with her as an adult. Director Ron Howard “came up with my hair covering my boobs, because they didn’t want me to have any kind of, I don’t know, shell bathing suit top or anything — which I understood,” she said.

But the result, the actress continued, is that when she shot scenes underwater, “I would just make sure to have my hair taped down to my breasts.”

Howard himself described Hannah as “amazing” during filming. He didn’t seem to see that anxiety and said that she “understood it was just something we needed to do for the movie. But she understood her character as a creature, a very natural, organic, free-spirited creature. And she made so much possible.”

In 2016, Hannah told Empire that despite not covering much, her mermaid costume took hours to assemble. Made up of latex and hand-painted gills, the actress was sometimes in the makeup chair for eight hours.

“It was a learning process on how not only to make it stay on and look seamless, but to weigh it enough to get me below the surface but not so much that I’d sink to the bottom,” she said.

One major issue with the costume: once she was in it, she needed to stay in it, no matter what. “If I had to pee, that would ruin the entire day’s shoot because it took so long to put on and take off,” Hannah added.

The costume was also painful to wear when she wasn’t in the water, so Hanks would hand-feed her snacks throughout the day while she stayed in the pool. Hannah joked, “I was like a beached dolphin, laying there wherever the crane placed me on the dock or on a stretcher. I was at the mercy of everybody.”

The post Daryl Hannah Says She Skipped Kissing Tom Hanks in ‘Splash’ Rehearsals: ‘So Embarrassing’ appeared first on TheWrap.