The Worst Love Scene Acting Of All Time

Love scenes are like the Olympics of acting. Imagine you go to work, take off your clothes, and pretend to make out with a coworker while the rest of your coworkers stand around watching and you might have some small idea of the awkwardness involved. So any time a love scene turns out really well, the actors involved should probably get some sort of special award or cash bonus. While bad acting or poor directorial choices can sink any film, love scenes can be particularly ruinous; when they don't turn out well it's often unintentionally hilarious or disturbing, taking the audience right out of the story and into a nightmare world of frightening facial expressions and dubious anatomical engineering. We're not talking about scenes that are meant to be comedic, that are intentionally terrible. We're talking about movie scenes that were intended to be exhilarating or emotionally powerful but are ... just completely not. 

In fact, sometimes a love scene can be so legendarily awful for everyone involved that it becomes more famous than the film itself. Watching the love scenes on this list go off the rails can be utterly fascinating; you try (and generally fail) to understand each decision, to map every oddball choice to some sort of recognizable human emotion or physical urge, slowly going mad as each question just leads to more questions.

The Fifty Shades books by E.L. James were a sensation because they depicted all sorts of grown-up activities in an unapologetic and female-centric manner. They were also a sensation because of a lot of cliche-heavy bad writing, but bad writing never stopped a book from being a fun read. The success of the series made a film adaptation inevitable, but somehow the films managed to remove not only any sensual charge the books managed to generate, they also remove any sense of naughty fun, which was half the reason anyone read the books in the first place. Say what you will about her writing, James eventually managed to write about lovemaking in a realistic and arguably healthy way. 

While all three of the Fifty Shades films have examples of turning those love scenes into remarkably uninteresting sequences, the third film, Fifty Shades Freed, manages to ruin the one thing James consistently got right: the accuracy. In a scene where the no-longer-inexperienced Anna spies a tantalizing, er, device in Christian Grey's Special Drawer, she goes on to use it without any sort of preparation or assistance — which would be incredibly uncomfortable and possibly even dangerous in real life. As Cosmopolitan complained, "Why does the movie version go out of its way to portray ... acts in a more painful manner than they were depicted in the book?"

For a long time it was believed that Watchmen, the classic graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, was unfilmable. Zack Snyder's 2009 adaptation did little to disprove this, combining some bravura action sequences with nifty design work with what many believe to be an almost total lack of understanding of what made the source material great. In one scene, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre have just returned from their first outing in their superhero suits and personas in years, and in the comic there are themes of empowerment, the power of adopted identity, and the dangers of being allowed to wallow in immaturity. 

As Paste Magazine put it, the scene "has gone down in popular opinion as one of the worst" love scenes "of all time." What really cinches how terrible this love scene is, however, is the use of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" on the soundtrack, which then segues into a delirious choir just as Silk Spectre does some really awkward culmination-acting. It's all so over-the-top it ends up being too weird for a movie in which everyone wears a ridiculous costume.

If you blinked and missed The Snowman in theaters a few years ago, good on you. Adapted from Jo Nesbo's bestselling Nordic noir crime novels, the film starred the phenomenally good-looking Micheal Fassbender as Harry Hole, an alcoholic detective chasing a gruesome killer. This was a high-profile film with big stars that somehow turned out as such an incomprehensible mess that you almost miss the fact that it also contains one of the most awkwardly awful love scenes of all time. 

When Harry and his ex-girlfriend Rakel (Charlotte Gainsbourg) sleep together at one point in the film, Gainsbourg appears to be half-asleep, or perhaps making a grocery list in her head as she moves through the scene's blocking. Fassbender does her one better, however, apparently method acting a dead person. As Matt Taylor of The Pop Break writes, "Fassbender remains perfectly still on his back and Gainsbourg squats over him looking unimpressed and sad, while also remaining perfectly still." It's one thing to try and convey emotional damage visually, but it's quite another to put together a love scene that makes it seem like you're bored and/or repulsed by the person you're with while actively making everyone at home squirm in their seats and reach for the fast-forward button.

Let's forget the fact that in the Star Wars universe, Padmé Amidala is 5 years older than Anakin Skywalker, meaning when they first meet she's 14 and he's 9. That gives their eventual romance some slightly weird vibes, as it's sort of like growing up to marry your babysitter — but that's not why the love scene in the second prequel, 2002's Attack of the Clones, is so bad. That comes down to two things. 

First, there's George Lucas' script: As The Independent writes, his dialogue is "famously stilted," featuring lines like "If you follow your thoughts through to a conclusion, it'll take us to a place we cannot go." Second, there are the moribund performances of Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen, who play the scene as if they were handed the script moments before Lucas yelled "Action!" and had only recently met (or, as The Independent continues, "with the coy awkwardness of drama students playing their first love scene before a classroom of tittering peers," which feels accurate). To be fair, "be as wooden as possible" seems to have been the main note that Lucas gave to all his actors, since the performances in these films are all equally muted and stiff — but that doesn't help sell this love scene.

Twilight is a very strange story in so many ways. From the century-old Edward Cullen attending high school to the baseball obsession to the shirtless werewolves — not to mention the fact that Bella essentially falls in love with a creature who wishes to eat her — there's just one bonkers thing after another in this story. At its core, of course, it's a romance, and the build-up to Bella and Edward finally getting together and consummating their long-simmering relationship should be a powerful moment, a love scene for the ages. 

Instead, what we get, according to AV Club, "is not what most people would consider a romantic experience." The problem is the dissonance between the soft, romantic music and the violence implied on the screen. While the love scene begins with a tender embrace and romantic music, the end result is a bedroom that looks like someone took a sledgehammer to it. Sure, the idea is to imply Edward's passion coupled with his supernatural strength and effect on the world, but it's a deeply unsettling sequence, especially as the morning after is framed to make Bella look as tiny and overwhelmed as possible.