Brooke Shields has spoken about how her first kiss was with a 29-year-old actor when she was just 11.
In the new Hulu documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, the actor, now 57, opens up about the exploitation and sexualisation she experienced as a child star.
Shields appeared as a child sex worker in the 1978 film Pretty Baby, directed by the late French filmmaker Louis Malle.
For one scene, Shields had to kiss actor Keith Carradine (Dexter; Nashville), who was in his late twenties at the time.
In the documentary, Shields describes the incident, recalling that Malle grew frustrated at the face she pulled while kissing (per TVInsider).
According to Shields, Carradine took her to one side and offered reassurance.
“‘Hey,’ he said to me. ‘You know what? This doesn’t count. This is all make-believe’,” she said.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, the documentary’s director Lana Wilson said: “This is a moment I wanted to feature and unpack because, even if child Brooke was fully cognisant of the role she was playing, and even if she realized that acting was pretend, I can’t help but think: ‘This is an actual 11-year-old girl having to kiss an actual 29-year-old man.’
“That inescapably is real. And the impact of that is real, too. Eleven-year-old Brooke expressed discomfort during the filming of this moment, but that discomfort was not taken seriously by the director.”
Elsewhere in the documentary, Shields opened up about being sexually assaulted in her twenties, allegedly by a Hollywood executive.
She also confessed that she didn’t know why her mother consented for her to star in Pretty Baby and pose nude for a magazine at the age of 10.
Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields premieres on Hulu in the US on 3 April, and will arrive on Disney Plus in the UK on 4 April.
