Sean Patrick Thomas, teen movie king of the late Nineties and early Noughties, is showing me an object far more impressive than any Oscar or Grammy: his MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss. “It’s right here!” the actor beams, after scurrying off camera to grab it. He’s in what he terms his “man cave”, the award stuffed beneath his big-screen TV and near his gym equipment. Thomas holds the popcorn bucket-shaped trophy up to his camera lens. It is, I tell him, almost stupidly large. “And heavy too!” he shoots back.
He won the Best Kiss award in 2001 for locking lips with Julia Stiles in the seminal romantic drama Save the Last Dance. To put into perspective the significance of this award – to anyone not raised on a cinematic diet of Freddie Prinze Jr, Rachael Leigh Cook and Jennifer Love Hewitt – Thomas and Stiles won it a year after Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair, for their saliva-riddled smooch in Cruel Intentions, and four years before Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams took home the prize for The Notebook.
