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Eva Mendes Spent Her Career Trying to Avoid Love Scenes
Eva Mendes once opened up about how she fought against shooting love scenes during her long career as an actor.
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Celebrity
Eva Mendes once shared she needed a few conditions met on a film set to shoot love scenes.
by Antonio Stallings
Published on January 23, 2025
Actor Eva Mendes has had what some might consider horror stories about her love scenes in the film We Own the Night. But for the most part, Mendes tried her best to avoid love scenes even if they were in the script.
Eva Mendes | Brian Ach/WireImageMendes hasn’t completely avoided doing love scenes in films. In addition to We Own the Night, she also had a love scene in 2013’s Place Beyond the Pines with husband Ryan Gosling. She had a horrible time doing those kinds of scenes in We Own the Night, but felt doing so served an appropriate purpose.
“I remember calling my acting coach after seeing that first scene and telling her how embarrassed I felt, and she said, ‘It means you bared your soul.’ I was like, ‘Right,'” she once told W (via HuffPost). “I’d never felt that before.”
But Mendes, who had aspirations of getting indie cred, also avoided love scenes so she wouldn’t lose respect as an actor. This was far more important to her than being a sex symbol.
“I know I walk a fine line between being a respected actor and being what they call a sex symbol,” she said. “It’s a hard one to walk if you want to be known as a real, credible actor. But I’ve never felt objectified. Nothing you see me do is an accident. I might act like it’s an accident, but the opposite is true. I’m incredibly calculated when it comes to my career.”
According to an interview with Black Film, she’s even gone to directors to try and omit love scenes from scripts. But only if she believed they add little to the movie’s narrative.
“They’re awful. You guys have heard it [before],” she said. “I am not giving you anything you haven’t heard from every other actress or actor. Love scenes are terrible. I have managed to—in my career—really skip through them. There are times in a script where I read that my character has a love scene and I carefully address it with the director and I say, “Can we please cut this out? I fell like it is gratuitous. There is no need for it and thankfully that has happened. I feel like I try to avoid them whenever I can and I have done a couple of things that have been appropriate for the films I have been in but I have never done a simulated sex scene because I just feel like they are rarely appropriate.”
Mendes was well-aware of her sex appeal as an actor, which she used to her advantage. On films like Ghost Rider, for instance, she let her body go to have the physique she felt comic book fans would want. Still, she wanted to be seen in the film industry for more than just her looks.
“I’m definitely responsible for the image that I put out there. But it does become frustrating,” Mendes once said in an interview with Allure (via Yahoo). “I’d love for my ambition and will and intellect and sense of humor to define me as well.”
But she didn’t feel the climate of the film industry helped with this at the time. She believed the reactions she received when shooting love scenes weren’t fair to women in her position. As an example, Mendes shared how she lacked the same level of respect other other kinds of actors did when they stripped for the camera.
“[When] other actresses who aren’t thought of, maybe, as being quite as attractive do full-frontal, they’re called brave,” she said. “Nobody has ever said, ‘Eva, you’re so brave for doing full-frontal nudity.’ Just because I’m attractive doesn’t mean it’s not still scary! Why am I not brave?”
