The actress accuses Randal Kleiser of trying to sell her 'sexual awakening.'
Brooke Shields' Hulu docuseries, Pretty Baby, is getting attention from both fans and those from her past. On Tuesday's episode of The Drew Barrymore Show, the 57-year-old actress reveals that The Blue Lagoon director Randal Kleiser reached out to her after watching the doc.
"I saw his name on my phone and I was like, ‘What do I do?’ and I let it go to voicemail because I was like, I want to see what the tone is. And he wants to chat, I don’t know about what, I don’t feel like bringing any of it back up again," she says of possibly speaking with the 76-year-old filmmaker.
The Blue Lagoon, released in 1980, takes place in the Victorian period when two children who are cousins, played by Shields and Christopher Atkins, are shipwrecked on a tropical island in the South Pacific. With no adults to guide them, the two make a simple life together, unaware that sexual maturity will eventually intervene.
Shields was around 14 years old when she started filming the movie while Atkins was four years older than her. The young co-stars were portrayed as nude for most of the movie, with Shields' long hair covering up her body.
The actress says in Pretty Baby that to market the movie "they wanted to sell my actual sexual awakening." She notes in the docuseries, "The irony was, I wasn't in touch with any of my own sexuality."
In the doc, Kleiser is quoted as telling a newspaper of Shields, "It's real, she's going from a child to a woman during the filming."
As for having a conversation with Kleiser now, Shields tells Barrymore, "It’s not about that, but it was about these males needing me to be in a certain category to serve their story, and it never was about me, it was not protective of me. It was fun and loving at times but I was just there, I was a pawn, I was a piece, I was a commodity."
Shields and Barrymore, who was also a child star, go on to discuss how they felt about the Me Too movement and where their stories fit.
"I didn’t know where I fell on the spectrum of it," Shields admits. "I don’t know where to interpret my experiences because I was made to feel culpable, and by the same time, you victim shame yourself, but we were so young and it was appropriate that we just, I couldn’t feel sorry, I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know, and so when it was called out to me as such I was like, 'No, not going there. It did not happen.'"
Barrymore agrees, adding, "That’s exactly how I felt. I felt like I couldn’t speak to the movement and I was so happy it was happening but I felt like I experienced too many things that were so gray and so awkward and that I didn’t know were wrong at the time, I guess as an adult with hindsight, as a mother of daughters."
The women also talk about their mothers, Teri Shields and Jaid Barrymore, overseeing much of their childhood careers.
When asked about how her mom would sit in on all her interviews, Shields says that move was "under the guise of protection but it was more ownership and fear I think."
Barrymore refers to Shields' mom as the original momager, to which the actress reacts, "All I knew was, keep my mother alive, keep dancing and get stuff, but to emerge from it not angry or jaded, it’s in there, it’s something in your character, it’s in my character."
She adds, "Doing this documentary, it’s given me life in the most interesting way."
Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields is now streaming on Hulu.
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