I finally got around to seeing Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005) today. I liked it a lot, and maybe even loved it, though it would take further viewings to say for sure.
I could say a fair bit more about the film (and I already have, here), but for now one point of utter trivia catches my eye. In this movie, Jeff Daniels plays a professor who may or may not be sexually interested in a student played by Anna Paquin. And although I haven’t seen it yet, this got me thinking about the time they played father and daughter in Fly Away Home (1996).
And this, in turn, got me thinking of other pairs of actors who have played parent-child relationships and have then gone on to play actual or potential lovers. Thing is, only one such pair leaps to mind right now, and it’s very local: Tom Scholte played the son of Babz Chula in Bruce Sweeney’s Live Bait (1995), and then they shared a sex scene or two in Sweeney’s follow-up Dirty (1998).
If I strain to think of other examples, I can think of Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles playing brother and sister in Michael Almereyda’s modernized Hamlet (2000) before playing husband and wife in John Moore’s remake of The Omen (2006). But however familial their Bard-based relationship may have been, it was a sibling relationship, not a parent-child one, so it doesn’t really count.
Although, speaking of Schreiber, he played a character in Kate & Leopold (2001) who starts off as Meg Ryan’s lover (or ex-lover) and then discovers that she is his great-great-grandmother or something. And that all happens in just the one movie! The scenes which make this connection were trimmed from the theatrical version of the film, but IIRC were included on the DVD.
Can anyone else think of any other examples?
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