Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze got turned on by a pottery wheel 35 years ago in Ghost.
“Whoa, my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch …” With The Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” playing, sleepless Molly (Moore) is working at her pottery wheel at 2 a.m. in an NYC loft.
Live-in love Sam (Swayze) sleepily wanders in. Oh, hey, he’s shirtless! He wraps his arms around her, nuzzles her neck, their fingers intertwine and caress … and all thoughts of making a pot disappear. And so the supernatural drama Ghost, released July 13, 1990, gave moviedom one of its most memorable love scenes.
Keep scrolling for a full breakdown of Moore and Swayze’s iconic film:
Who Was Involved
It would become 1990’s biggest money maker, but Ghost was a tough sell in terms of casting. After all, the leading man quickly gets shot and killed, only to stick around in spectral form. His agenda: walk through stuff, moon over his soulmate and then save her life.
“I just didn’t get it. I said, ‘Hey, the guy’s dead. How are you gonna have a romance?’ Famous last words,” Bruce Willis told The New York Times of passing on the role. (The self-proclaimed “knucklehead” missed a chance to star opposite his then-wife.)
Other names that came and went: Harrison Ford, Michael J. Fox, Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Alec Baldwin and Tom Cruise. Dirty Dancing was a few years behind Swayze, but he nailed the audition. Meanwhile, Moore was always the No. 1 choice for the female lead, but Michelle Pfeiffer, Molly Ringwald, Meg Ryan, Nicole Kidman and up-and-comer Julia Roberts were also contenders.
Why We Remember It
Sheer swooniness! “It was pretty sexy playing in all that clay, so all we had to do was go with it, let our imaginations run wild and then touch each other’s arms for the sparks to fly,” Swayze wrote in his memoir with wife Lisa Niemi, The Time of My Life. Keeping the action PG-13 — no “jumping each other’s bones,” per Swayze — was key: “You want to see them looking intently into each other’s eyes, in an intimate, personal moment that conveys desire.”
Key Details
Swayze and Moore were barely past the introductions when it was time to get dirty.
“His face was so beet-red!” Moore told People. But he was the perfect gentleman. Recalled the actress: “I would say, ‘Please don’t let my breast be exposed.’ And he would say, ‘OK.’ If he noticed my shirt coming up over my rear, he would pull it down.”
The Aftermath
A scene this distinctive is just begging to be parodied — and many have taken it for a spin, like Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake in the viral “Evolution of End Zone Dancing.” In 1991’s The Naked Gun 2 1⁄2: The Smell of Fear, Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley got behind the wheel … though close-ups revealed a surplus of hands and then (ick) feet. Snoop Dogg assisted Martha Stewart as she frosted a spinning cake for VH1, while The Bachelor indulged Peter Weber. More TV takes: Two and a Half Men, Euphoria, Community, Family Guy.
In 2023, Channing Tatum revealed his production company had bought the rights to the film, but no greenlight yet for a remake.
A New Perspective
Moore didn’t leave with the skills to DIY her dinnerware: “If you could see my sad little pots … they literally look like something that somebody does in kindergarten,” she told Seth Meyers of her souvenirs last year. “But I have my initials on them, and I treasure them.”
Where Are They Now?
We lost Swayze to pancreatic cancer in 2009. He was 57. As for Moore, 35 years after her Ghost breakthrough, she took home a best actress in a musical or comedy Golden Globe for The Substance.
