Brooke Shields is praising an adult she says “took really good care” of her when she was being sexualized as a child actor.
The “Suddenly Susan” star said on “The Drew Barrymore Show.”“Tuesday that she felt male filmmakers exploited her as a child.
“It was about these men who needed me to be in a certain category [of beauty] to serve his story. And it was never about me,” Shields said. “He never protected me. It was funny and loving at times, but it was: it was just there. I was a pawn.”
But Brookes credited one man in Hollywood who didn’t fit that description: her “Pretty Baby” co-star Keith Carradine.
Shields was 11 years old when she played a child sex worker in the controversial 1978 film. Carradine, now 73, was 20 when she played Shields’ character’s love interest.
Shields told Barrymore that her first kiss was the one she and Carradine’s characters shared in “Pretty Baby.”
“Keith Carradine took really good care of me,” Shields said.
She told Barrymore what Carradine told her before shooting the kissing scene: “He looked at me and said, ‘You know, that doesn’t count as a first kiss.'”
“That was kind and protective and caring on a level that I don’t think I even knew at the time,” Shields said, adding that until then she had “never kissed a guy before.”
Shields explains the filming of the kissing scene in her Hulu documentary, also called “Pretty Baby,” which premiered earlier this month. In the documentary, Shields says she struggled while filming the intimate scene and that the film’s director, Louis Malle, was insensitive to her discomfort. Shields says she continued to scrunch up her face in disgust during each take, for which Malle reprimanded her.
Finally, Carradine called for a hit, pulled Shields aside, and calmed her down by telling her it was “pretending” and “pretending,” which was exactly what she needed to hear to get through the scene.
In an interview with Rolling Stonedocumentary director Lana Wilson said: “This is a moment I wanted to present and unpack because even if little Brooke was fully aware of the role she was playing, and even if she realized that acting was pretending , I can” Don’t stop thinking, “This is a real 11-year-old girl who has to kiss a 29-year-old man.”
“This is inescapably real,” Wilson continued. “And the impact of that is real, too. Brooke, 11, expressed discomfort during the filming of this moment, but the director didn’t take that discomfort seriously.”
