As a film, Netflix’s You People raises all manner of questions. Questions like “Do we really need an update of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in 2023?” and “Shouldn’t a 2023 remake of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner have more to say than this?” and “Shouldn’t the leads of an expensive streaming romcom have more chemistry than Jonah Hill and Lauren London, two actors who for much of the film look like strangers who literally just met in an elevator and don’t particularly like each other very much?”
But the question “Did they actually kiss?” probably shouldn’t be one of those questions. Because, after all, we can see that they do. Right at the end, Hill and London get married, and they lean into each other, and they kiss. Confetti falls from the sky and lands on them. A supporting character even negatively critiques the kiss, pointing out that Jonah Hill is using more tongue than is generally considered acceptable. Regardless of anything else you think about the film, which should be a lot because it isn’t very good, they kiss at the end. They definitely kiss.
Except maybe they don’t. On a recent episode of The Brilliant Idiots podcast, comedian Andrew Schulz revealed that the whole kiss was nothing but a CGI construction. “I don’t even know if I should share this shit,” Schulz said, before immediately sharing the weird staging of the kiss on set. “It’s CGI. Swear to God. I’m there, I’m watching the wedding, and I see them go in for the kiss, and their faces stop like this far. And I’m like, ‘I wonder how they’re gonna play that in the movie. Oh, they’re probably just gonna cut right there.’ But in the movie, you could see their faces come close, and then you could see their faces morph a little bit into a fake kiss.”
If this is true, it’s hard to know what to make of it. On the one hand, of course you can make two characters fake kiss with CGI. You can do anything with CGI. CGI helped Thanos throw a moon at Iron Man, so it only stands to reason that it should make Jonah Hill kiss Lauren London. But on the other hand, it does feel a bit like cheating. You People is a romcom, after all, and people do kiss each other in romcoms. Depriving us (the viewers) of that moment (a climactic romantic gesture) in favour of something much worse (mashing two clumps of pixels together with a computer) robs the moment of intimacy.
Obviously this is not the first time that a kiss between leads has been faked. As recently as last year, Netflix’s big Lindsay Lohan comeback movie Falling For Christmas ended with a kiss between Chord Overstreet and what was very obviously Lohan’s stand-in. And in his fleet of Christian movies, Kirk Cameron will only ever kiss his wife – even if she has to dress up as his co-star – so as to not destroy the foundations of their marriage.
Post-Covid, this isn’t really that much of a big deal. During the pandemic, when movies didn’t know if they could ever show regular kissing scenes again, all sorts of workarounds were schemed up. Although they eventually settled on a consensus involving actors thoroughly disinfecting their mouths after each kiss, in the thick of it continuing dramas like EastEnders made their stars kiss through perspex screens that were subsequently airbrushed out and, perhaps taking their queue from Cameron, brought in the actors’ real-life partners to dress up and kiss.
So this has been done before. But at least all those examples were real kisses, whether through stand-ins or through plastic. CGI is a whole new level up. That’s taking two people and making them do something that they did not, and that raises a lot of issues about the future of acting. If you’re signing on for a project, how can you trust the director not to rush out and make you do things you didn’t physically film? Is the future of intimacy in Hollywood going to be deepfaked sex scenes? Will actors need to seek out specific contractual clauses promising them that they won’t be turned into a horny avatar in post production? There are a lot of legitimate questions to be asked here. How strange that it was 2023’s dumbest romcom that started asking them.
