Matt Damon says Michael Douglas is a “wonderful” kisser. He also tells Playboy magazine that he and the veteran actor strategized their onscreen make-out sessions for Steven Soderbergh’ s Liberace movie for HBO, Behind The Candelabra , “like a football plan,” which scarily brings to mind John Madden and Al Michaels cavorting in Speedos while diagramming a play-action pass. The Promised Land actor tells interviewer Stephen Rebello that he usually says no to nude scenes, “but I just did a lot of it playing the long-term partner of Liberace, Scott Thorson in Behind the Candelabra .” He took the plunge, he explains, because Soderbergh, who directed Damon on the Oceans films and The Informant! was behind the camera and the scenes in question were “tastefully done.” And, really, who could resist being held firmly in the masculine arms of the silver-maned actor who played Gordon Gekko ? Damon, who plays the much younger lover of the flamboyant piano showman — the Norman Jean Roy photograph above, which appeared in Vanity Fair, shows them in character — says the movie will make some people uncomfortable because “you’re witnessing something really intimate you would normally see with a man and a woman, but instead it’s two men”. He, on the other hand, found the dynamic “thrilling” even though some of the more intimate scenes weren’t “the most natural thing in the world to do, though. Like, for one scene, I had to come out of a pool, go over to Michael, straddle him on a chaise longue and start kissing him. And throughout the script, it’s not like I kiss him just once. We drew it up like a football plan.” At least he didn’t make a pitcher/catcher reference. Damon goes on to say that he once asked the late Heath Ledger how he managed the scene with Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain where to two men hungrily suck face. Ledger’s response: “Well, mate, I drank half a case of beer in my trailer.” Damon add that when he laughed at that response, Ledger told him: “No, I’m serious. I needed to just go for it. If you can’t do that, you’re not making the movie.” The conversation leads Rebello to ask Damon what it was like “when you and Ben Affleck were constantly asked if you were gay, back when you were starting your careers” “I never denied those rumors because I was offended and didn’t want to offend my friends who were gay—as if being gay were some kind of fucking disease,” Damon responds. “It put me in a weird position in that sense. The whole thing was just gross.” [ Playboy ] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
