Real-life couples creating real-deal sparks in the best movies to star IRL partners
The chemistry between off-screen items can work wonders
Neon's horror feature "Together" releases on July 30 in the U.S. and stars off-screen couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco as Millie and Tim, a pair who decamp to a bucolic countryside town to reset. There, they encounter a horrifying force that seems to gradually take over their bodies. Acting is harder than it looks, perhaps never more so than when starring opposite your actual spouse and having to graft fake conflict on top of whatever is actually going on. When done well, the outcome of this made-up marital mayhem is notable.
'The Big Sleep' (1946)
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were one of Hollywood's most iconic couples, even if their age gap of 25 years would today raise eyebrows. "The Big Sleep" follows private detective Philip Marlowe (Bogart), whom the wealthy Rutledge family hires to investigate the suspected blackmail of their daughter Carmen. Bacall plays Carmen's sister Vivian, and as Marlowe unravels the plot's web of blackmail and murder, he and Vivian fall in love. Considered a classic with a plot that has been "puzzling viewers ever since," the movie succeeds on the basis of "firecracker dialogue, brutal action, sultry atmosphere and the volcanic sexual chemistry" between the couple, said the BBC.
'Eyes Wide Shut' (1999)
Legendary director Stanley Kubrick ("Dr. Strangelove") died in 1999 shortly after finishing work on his last picture, "Eyes Wide Shut." It starred Hollywood then-married luminaries Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise as Bill and Alice Harford, a wealthy New York City couple experiencing marital doldrums. After Alice confesses that she has been mulling an affair, an unnerved and jealous Bill wanders the city and ends up at a masked orgy run by a secret society. "The casting of Cruise and Kidman complicates matters," said the British Film Institute, and the dreamlike plot leaves the film "depending for its strangeness on enigmatic behavior in formal surroundings." Ultimately, "Eyes Wide Shut" was "no masterpiece," but it was nevertheless "endlessly fascinating."
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'The Americans' (2013-2018)
If you thought the initial chemistry between Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell) Jennings was fire, you weren't wrong. Rhys and Russell, who play deep cover Soviet agents in suburban DC in a timeline that begins late in the Cold War, got together during the filming of the acclaimed show's first season. The core drama in FX's "The Americans" comes from Philip's growing doubts about their work, which involves deceit, murder, betrayal and a lot of seduction, and Elizabeth's efforts to keep him in line without destroying their family. It was "the best spy show on TV" in part because the "deaths are uglier, the heartbreaks harsher and the conflict between family and country messier" than any other comparable espionage show, said The Guardian.
'A Quiet Place' (2018)
John Krasinski and Emily Blunt had been together for a decade by the time they starred together in this Krasinski-penned post-apocalyptic creature feature that spawned both a sequel and a prequel. In "A Quiet Place," Krasinski and Blunt play Lee and Evelyn Abbott, a couple trying to keep themselves and their kids alive while they are stalked by blind aliens who hunt by sound. That means the action mostly takes place in silence, and "each syllable seems selected to provide the maximum amount of impact," said Film School Rejects. The result is the rare horror film that "blends high-concept with jump scares and manages to pull both of them off."
'The Power of the Dog' (2021)
Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst starred together in the well-received second season of FX's anthology series "Fargo" and then got together after the show aired. In director Jane Campion's "The Power of the Dog," Plemons plays George Burbank, a lonely cowboy who runs a ranch with his domineering brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). When George falls in love with a widowed hotelier named Rose (Dunst) and invites her and her awkward son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to move in with the brothers, it sets off a slow-burning psychodrama as Phil "seethes with a roiling crock full of emotions — resentment, jealousy, disdain," said Time.
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