While most people could only dream of filming a sex scene with their celebrity crush, Jake Gyllenhaal said it was 'torture'.
Gyllenhaal, like most people who watched Friends, admitted to having a crush on Jennifer Aniston and never expected he'd end up playing her love interest in a movie.
The pair starred in The Good Girl together in 2002. Aniston played Justine Last in the rom com, while Gyllenhaal portrayed the character of Holden Worther.
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The movie's synopsis reads: "Justine lives a mundane lifestyle with her husband. Things take a turn when she meets a young man at her workplace and falls in love with him."
Nearly two decades on from the film's release, The Covenant star Gyllenhaal reflected on what it was like filming raunchy scenes with Aniston.
Speaking to Howard Stern on his radio show, the 40-year-old actor was asked if it was 'torture' filming those scenes with the Friends alum in the wake of his long-standing crush.
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"Oh yeah, it was torture, yes it was,'' Gyllenhaal replied. ''But it was also not torture. I mean, come on, it was like a mix of both."
Stern went on to ask: "Did you say to Jennifer Aniston, 'Listen Jennifer, I'm not trying to be rude here, if you're feeling something - protrusion or whatever - I can't control this'?"
Giggling at the word 'protrusion', Gyllenhaal said: "Yes, I said it just like that."
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He went on to describe all love scenes in movies as 'awkward' as there are as many as 50 people in the room with the watching it at the time.
"That doesn't turn me on," he said. "So most of the time, it's oddly mechanical."
Gyllenhaal also described such scenes as a 'dance' that are choreographed for the camera.
Awkward as it might have been, I'm sure there are worse scenes to film...
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Aniston isn't the only Hollywood starlet Gyllenhaal's lucky enough to have had on-screen coitus with - he's also filmed some rather racy scenes with Anne Hathaway in Love and Other Drugs and Brokeback Mountain.
Gyllenhaal noted that their sex scenes in BAFTA award winning Brokeback Mountain made filming their 2010 romance together much less uncomfortable.
"I’m lucky. Annie and I had already had sex on film in Brokeback Mountain, so I wasn't too nervous," he said at the time of the movie's release.
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"There's something about the way Annie and I both work which is inherently very musical."
And sweet, sweet music they (appeared) to have made.
Topics: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jennifer Aniston, Film and TV, Celebrity
Niamh Shackleton