Kathleen Turner says her worst onscreen kiss was with Burt Reynolds

Erin Donnelly
·Yahoo Life Senior Editor
Updated

Loose lips may sink ships, but Kathleen Turner isn’t afraid to kiss and tell. During her appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen on Tuesday, the actress named the late Burt Reynolds as her worst onscreen kissing partner.

“He sucked,” she told Cohen of smooching Reynolds, who died last fall, in the 1988 comedy Switching Channels. She and Reynolds played former spouses in box office dud.

The 65-year-old actress — who years ago named Body Heat’s William Hurt as her best onscreen kiss — explained that Michael Caine had originally been cast as the male lead.

“I had rehearsed with Michael Caine,” she told Cohen and fellow guest Ilana Glazer. “I was supposed to do the film with Michael Caine — good choice, right? Well, Michael Caine got caught on Jaws 4 [Jaws: The Revenge] — the shark kept breaking down — and I was pregnant, and I had a stop date, but he did not.”

Turner’s pregnancy meant she had to wrap up filming with or without Caine, and “finally the producer went and hired Burt Whatshisface.”

The disdain, by all accounts, was mutual. When Cohen had Reynolds himself on his show in March 2018 — just months before the Smokey and the Bandit’s star death that September — the 82-year-old named Turner as the most overrated actor of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Last August, Turner spoke out about what she called Reynolds’s “shocking” behavior on the set.

"Working with Burt Reynolds was terrible,” she told Vulture. “The first day Burt came in he made me cry. He said something about not taking second place to a woman. His behavior was shocking. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t someone’s equal. I left the room sobbing. I called my husband and said, 'I don’t know what to do.' He said, 'You just do the job.' It got to be very hostile because the crew began taking sides. But as for the performance, I was able to put the negativity aside. I’m not convinced Burt was.”

Speaking to Cohen on Tuesday, Turner had more positive things to say about her guest role on Friends as Chandler Bing’s dad, a transgender woman. She joked that onscreen son Matthew Perry still calls her “Dad,” but added that she’d hand the role off to an actual trans woman today.

“Of course I wouldn't do it now because there would be real people able to do it," she said.

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