Dakota Fanning looks back on her first kiss playing a young Reese Witherspoon
Everyone remembers their first kiss — including Dakota Fanning, who recalls her first smooch during a W Magazine Screen Test with Lynn Hirschberg. She explains that it all went down when she was playing a young Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama. (We thought our first kiss stories were awkward! Imagine having an entire room of people watching you!)
“First scene of the movie, I play a young Reese Witherspoon, and that was my first kiss. I was seven years old. He was ten. It was very…nerve-wracking,” Fanning explains during her interview.
Need a quick refresher? Here’s the scene Fanning is referring to. It’s pretty dang cute.
“Hot stuff for a seven and a ten-year-old!” Fanning jokes to Hirschberg.
According to Fanning’s childhood studio teacher, Fanning would turn away and wipe her mouth off every time they did a take with the kiss. She tried to be sneaky so the boy wouldn’t see. But obviously she wasn’t being sneaky enough.
We get it, Dakota! Boys have cooties!
The actress goes on to explain that her ~real~ first kiss didn’t happen until she was 14. The boy she was about to kiss gave her the signal when he turned his baseball cap around. She was then paranoid that everyone could see that her face had been chapped by the boy’s “16-year-old scruff.”
“We’ve all been chapped by scruff at some point on our face,” Fanning says as she keels over laughing.
Honestly, yeah! That’s pretty freaking relatable! Perhaps Fanning should make a PSA — be aware of the scruff, ladies and gents.
