Turns out, Sally Field didn’t exactly have a field day when it came time to kiss her Smokey and the Bandit costar Burt Reynolds.
The Spoiler Alert star revealed that Reynolds, who died in 2018, gave her the worst onscreen kiss of her entire career while answering a fan question on Thursday’s episode of Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live.
“Oh boy, shall I really name names here?” Field pondered. “Okay, this is gonna be a shocker. Hold on, folks… Burt Reynolds.”
She went on to elaborate: “It was just not something he really did very well. I could go into detail, but you don’t want to hear it.”
When host Andy Cohen and fellow guest star Idina Menzel encouraged her to dish more, Field simply explained, “Just a lot of drooling was involved.” Her response quickly put an end to further questioning.
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Field first met Reynolds on the set of Smokey and the Bandit and, despite their lackluster lip-locks, the pair dated on and off for five years throughout the late 1970s and early ’80s. In the decades following their split, Reynolds frequently described Field as the love of his life, at one point even strangely divulging that he’d been in love with her since she was 7 years old.
While Reynolds might have had a rose-tinted (some would say odd) view of their relationship, the same couldn’t be said for Field. The actress detailed in her 2018 memoir, In Pieces — which came out just days after his death — that the Boogie Nights actor was controlling and that as a couple they were “a perfect match of flaws,” per Vanity Fair.
After his death, Field told the cast of The View that Reynolds would “always be in my heart and my history,” but that she largely hadn’t spoken to him in the last 30 years of his life.
Everett Collection Sally Field and Burt Reynolds in ‘Smokey and the Bandit’
“He was not someone I could be around. He was just not good for me in any way,” Field told Variety in March. “And he had somehow invented in his rethinking of everything that I was more important to him than he had thought, but I wasn’t. He just wanted to have the thing he didn’t have. I just didn’t want to deal with that.”
Watch Field discuss her awkward kiss in the clip above.
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