Sally Field has spent more than 50 years in Hollywood. She’s won two Academy Awards, three Emmys, and worked alongside some of the most legendary leading men in cinema history. So when a fan asked her to name the worst on-screen kiss of her entire career, she had plenty of material to choose from.
She didn’t hesitate. And she didn’t hold back.
During a December 2022 appearance on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Field was asked by a caller to identify her worst mouth-to-mouth moment on film. The caller noted that Field had once named James Garner her best on-screen kiss. Now they wanted the opposite.
Field paused. “Oh boy, shall I really name names here?” she asked, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Cohen encouraged her to go for it.
“Okay, this is gonna be a shocker. Hold on, folks,” she said. Then she dropped the name: Burt Reynolds.
“Just a Lot of Drooling”
The audience laughed. Fellow guest Idina Menzel looked stunned. But Field wasn’t finished.
“It was just not something he really did very well,” she said of kissing Reynolds. “I could go into detail, but you don’t want to hear it”.
Cohen pressed her, asking if she was talking about tongue.
“No… just a lot of drooling was involved,” Field clarified.
That ended the questioning.
A Complicated History
The revelation was especially surprising because Field and Reynolds weren’t just co-stars. They met on the set of Smokey and the Bandit in 1977 and dated on and off for five years throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s. Their relationship was intense, tumultuous, and deeply complicated.
Reynolds, who died in 2018 at 82, spoke about Field frequently in his later years. He called her “the one that got away” and claimed he had been in love with her since she was seven years old.
Field’s feelings were more ambivalent. In her 2018 memoir In Pieces, she described Reynolds as controlling and said the two of them were “a perfect match of flaws”. She later revealed that she had largely stopped speaking to him in the final 30 years of his life.
“He was not someone I could be around,” she told Variety in March 2022. “He was just not good for me in any way. 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”.
The “Caretaker” Dynamic
Field has also spoken about the nature of their connection. In an interview with Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America shortly after Reynolds’ death, she described how quickly things escalated between them — and what the relationship was really built on.
“We had known each other about three days, four days at that point. It was instantaneous, and four days felt like four years,” she said. “We were sort of deeply entangled. That nature of it wasn’t just, ‘Oh, this is a love affair.’ There was some ingredient between us having to do with my caretaking and him needing to be taken care of”.
A Farewell, Despite Everything
Even after decades of distance and a lifetime of complicated feelings, Field was gracious after Reynolds passed away. In a statement following his death, she said: “There are times in your life that never fade away. They stay alive, even 40 years later. My years with Burt never leave my mind. He will be in my history and my heart, for as long as I live. Rest, Buddy”.
So there it is. Sally Field has given us some of the most iconic romantic moments in film history. But apparently, at least one of them involved a whole lot of drool. 😅
What’s your favorite Sally Field movie? Let us know in the comments. 👇
