Jennifer Grey Shares Dirty Dancing Memory With Patrick Swayze
Originally appeared on E! Online
Nobody puts Baby in the corner, and no one should ever attempt the Dirty Dancing lift without Patrick Swayze, according to Jennifer Grey.
"Patrick is the only one who really anyone should try it with, because he was just such a good ballet dancer," Jennifer told E! News' The Rundown host Erin Lim Rhodes at the Sundance Film Festival premiere of A Real Pain. "He was so used to lifting women and so strong. By the end of the movie, I trusted him so much."
In fact, the only time Jennifer performed the tricky feat with Patrick, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2009 at age 57, was when they filmed the iconic lake scene.
"I never rehearsed it," the 63-year-old said. "There was no room for a panic attack."
Remembering how she was "really scared and protective" of her body at the time, Jennifer recalled giving a "hard no" to practicing the dance move off-camera.
"If you've ever tried it, you'd understand what it means to do it," the actress explained, jokingly adding that she had "no choice" but to do the lift live when it came time to shoot the scene. "It was one of those game day things."
But despite Jennifer's warning, many stars have recreated the duo's lift since Dirty Dancing's 1987 release. Abigail Breslin and Johnny Castle did the move during a 2017 remake of the film, and Ryan Gosling lifted Emma Stone—who serves as a producer on Jennifer's new film A Real Pain—over his head like a true loverboy in 2011's Crazy, Stupid, Love.
And just like Jennifer, Emma had reservations about the stunt.
"When we do Crazy, Stupid, Love, I know that we're gonna do the Dirty Dancing lift. I don't know, however, that I have an internalized phobia of being lifted over someone's head at the height of about six feet," the Oscar winner—who broke both of her arms at gymnastics class when she was young—shared during a 2017 appearance on The Graham Norton Show. "It was a lot, and then it was a meltdown."
Emma added that she "laid down crying" after the lift and had to recover by watching her pick-me-up movie Labyrinth. As she quipped, "This is so stupid."
For more secrets about Dirty Dancing, keep reading.