Open sex on film sets Kim Basinger

Kim Basinger left her casting test for “Nine and a Half Weeks” (1986) distraught.

Humiliated and knowing that she wanted nothing to do with that movie, she drove to her house without stopping crying. But upon arrival she found 24 red roses waiting for her with a note signed by the film's director, Adrian Lyne, and her co-star, Mickey Rourke.

Lyne always had her as a first choice for the film based on Ingeborg Day's erotic autobiography. The studio wanted a more popular actress, so Jacqueline Bisset, Isabella Rosselini and Kathleen Turner did the casting. But none passed the test like Kim. "It was very sexual and very strange," the star, who was 33 years old when the film was shot, would recall: "I just wanted to get up and leave."

When he entered her room, Lyne barely spoke to her, only giving Rourke directions. In the scene, he would throw bills on the floor at her and she would have to pretend to be a prostitute who would pick them up while she moved on all fours and ended up undressing and giving herself to the actor when he finally ordered her to.

During filming, Lyne forbade the actors to speak to each other off-camera. “She must have been afraid of him”, justified the director, “if they went out for coffee together we would lose that tension. It was also proposed to film the scenes in chronological order, so that Kim's physical and, above all, psychological deterioration would be simultaneous with that of her character. She must live on the edge of terror. She wanted those ten weeks of shooting to be like the nine and a half weeks of the relationship,” Lyne recounted.

When the day came to shoot the last scene in which the protagonists agree to a suicide, the character of Basinger had to be at the limit of her physical and emotional resistance. Things weren't going the way Lyne wanted them to. After a brief chat with Rourke, the actor grabbed Basinger's arm tightly. She started to scream, but he wouldn't let her go. She tried to defend herself against her and hit him, and he slapped her back. Only when tears streamed down Basinger's face in a fit of panic was the director ready to roll. The scene was cut, according to Lyne, because audiences "hated Mickey for doing it, Kim for letting it go, me for doing it, and the whole movie."

Lyne, for her part, defended her behavior with the actress: “It wasn't nice, but it was useful. Kim is a bit like a girl. She is innocent. That's part of the appeal of it. In fact, she doesn't act, she just reacts, a quality that Marilyn Monroe also had."

"After finishing the film she did not want to see anyone who had participated in the filming," said the actress about her participation in the film that changed her life. “There were times when I wanted to drop everything, wondering if Adrian Lyne was a sick man or if all of us were sick for giving in to it. But in the end I faced my fear and went through it, "confessed the actress. "All actresses should experience something like this, I came out stronger than in my entire life."