The stars who failed Hollywood’s ‘chemistry test’

Nor have more recent experiences between actors been pleasant ones. When Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson first auditioned for the Twilight saga, they met in the bedroom of the director Catherine Hardwicke’s house and were asked to attempt one of the script’s innumerable love scenes, to which Pattinson went full method. In Hardwicke’s recollection, “They did the kissing scene and he fell off and landed right there on this floor. Rob was so into it, he fell off the bed. I’m like, ‘Dude, calm down.’” 

An additional problem was that, whatever the circumstances of their audition, Stewart was still a minor. As Hardwicke said, “I thought, ‘Oh my god, Kristen was 17, I don’t want to get in some illegal thing.’ So I remember I told Rob, ‘By the way, Kristen is 17. In our country, it’s illegal for them to have sexual relations.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, OK, whatever.’” At the time, Pattinson was 21. During filming of the series, he and Stewart famously became a couple, before equally famously splitting after her affair with her Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders. 

Likewise, although the Fifty Shades of Grey series was widely criticised for the apparent absence of chemistry between its stars Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, the meeting between the originally cast Charlie Hunnam and Johnson – masterminded by the original film’s director Sam Taylor-Johnson – sounds distinctly queasy. After the previous actresses who auditioned with Hunnam (and had to be “kissed and squeezed” by him) were judged to be too passive, a far more intimate audition was arranged at an LA hotel room, in which Taylor-Johnson was said to have pushed the pair to their limits “in every sense”.  

Whatever happened in the hotel room, Johnson was successful in obtaining the part. Hunnam, however, subsequently dropped out, citing “something of a nervous breakdown”. It is not difficult to infer that something may have gone awry in this particular chemistry test.