Brooke Shields filmed The Blue Lagoon at 14. She had an 'innocent romance' with her 18yo co-star.

It may have a meagre eight per cent critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but 42 years after the release of The Blue Lagoon, the film remains a controversial cult classic. 

Billed as a "coming-of-age, romance-survival drama", the 1980 motion picture stars Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins as young cousins stuck on a tropical island in the South Pacific. They grow up into good-looking horny teenagers, fall in love, sleep together, and have a baby.

As you do.

Watching The Blue Lagoon may make you laugh and cringe today for its quite ridiculous storyline and sometimes terrible acting, but it will likely also make you deeply uncomfortable. And well it should - Shields was only 14 when she made the film, and her co-star was 18. 

There is explicit nudity throughout (although it has been reported that body doubles were used and that Shields had her long-haired wig taped to her front so that you could not see her breasts), and both actors are highly sexualised, particularly Shields. Who, it bears repeating, is 14 years old. 

This movie would never get made today. Image: Columbia Pictures.

Unfortunately, this hyper-sexualisation wasn't anything new for Shields. Preternaturally beautiful, one of her first roles was as a 12-year-old prostitute living in New Orleans in 1978's Pretty Baby, another highly controversial film. Just after The Blue Lagoon was released, she featured in a series of Calvin Klein ads with the slogan "You know what gets between me and my Calvins? Nothing". A few networks refused to air the ads, citing child pornography concerns.

While The Blue Lagoon was canned by critics and Shields has the dubious honour of being the very first recipient of the Razzie Award for worst actress, the movie was a commercial success and received an Oscar nomination for best cinematography.

Watch the trailer for The Blue Lagoon. Post continues below.

Behind the scenes, there was some... questionable stuff happening. Atkins revealed in a 2013 interview that he spent the first two weeks living on a boat, getting into character and that the director, Randal Kleiser, wanted to ensure the chemistry on screen was legitimate.

"I was 18 and Brooke Shields was 14, and the director wanted us to be attracted to each other. He stuck a picture of her over my bunk on the boat when I was first there so I could start becoming attracted to her. He said it will come out in your eyes, it will come out in real time on film," Atkins recalled.

The strategy worked.

"Brooke and I had a little bit of a romantic, innocent sort of romance in the very beginning of the film," Atkins said. "It was very nice - we were very, very close friends, put it that way."

The romance didn't last long though. "Brooke got tired of me. She thought I took acting too seriously. I was always trying to get into a mood while she would be skipping off to joke with the crew," Atkins told People magazine.

(Very) young love. Image: Columbia Pictures.

Just this week, Shields, now 57, and Atkins, now 61, looked back on filming The Blue Lagoon while on an episode of Shields' podcast Now What? With Brooke Shields.

"Never again will a movie be made like that. It wouldn't be allowed," Shields said. "Animals were hurt in the movie. We were spearing fish and all kinds of crazy things. Children are naked running down a beach."

Atkins recalled, "There were scenes where I was butt naked with you, if you remember, sliding down that slide and things like that. And that was a little awkward, but it was kind of funny for me because at this point in time I would just do it."

Shields laughed about her hair being used to cover up her breasts. "I don’t know what I was trying to cover. Remember the bumpy pads? They would stick these little flesh-coloured things to my nipple because nipple is where they drew the line, evidently, with this movie."

Shields spoke about the weirdness of the crew wanting them to date in real life, reinforcing what Atkins had said in prior interviews. "What I remember, too, is that they wanted us so desperately to fall in love with each other. It also struck me, too, because I remember thinking, 'Hey, let's just get to know each other first rather than trying to make us fall in love with each other and force the situation.' And I didn't react well to being forced into feeling anything. I wanted to sort of be left a little bit to my own."

Despite the media attention and the scrutiny on her looks and body, Shields came away relatively unscathed.

"It was a really interesting disconnect. You sort of desensitise yourself to anything sexual. In Blue Lagoon, I'm using a glue gun, taping my hair, anything I can so my body doesn't show I have boobs," she wrote in her 2014 memoir, There Was A Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me. "And I didn't realise I was doing it, because I was a kid. I was in a cocoon with my mum."

However, in a recent appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, the 57-year-old actor revealed she felt taken advantage of while being interviewed in her early 20s by renowned interviewer Barbara Walters. Shields said that Walters kept pressing her for details about substance abuse and bisexuality, as well as her physical measurements.

"She asked me what my measurements were and asked me to stand up, and I stand up and she's like comparing herself to this little girl, and I thought, 'This isn't right. I don't understand what this is.' But I just, I behaved and smiled and felt like so taken advantage of in so many ways," Shields said.

"But over the years, you know when you’ve been in the public eye and have been commented on all the time, everybody has an opinion, and you all get to say it, and now that's where social media I think can be dangerous. Then you learn to say no this is my truth."

On her podcast, the actor lamented revealing the status of her virginity when she was 20 in her 1985 book On Your Own. Shields' virginity became a point of media obsession and she was dubbed the most famous virgin in the world.

"I think it was, in hindsight, a bit of a mistake for me to be so open about my virginity because it never left me alone," she said. "I would get a lot of fan mail from kids saying, 'Oh, my boyfriend's pressuring me, and I don't want to have sex. What do I do?' My narrative was, 'You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to'."

The revelation meant that she fielded weird and inappropriate questions from men for years. "I became the most famous virgin in the world. To be in the line of fire at such a young age in that way, I gained a resilience, and it set me up to be ready for anything in this industry, which can be difficult."

In her 2014 memoir, Shields divulged she lost her virginity to actor Dean Cain when she was a 22-year-old student at Princeton University.

"I got so overwhelmed that I jumped out of my bed. I was buck naked, streaking down a hallway and running as if I had just stolen someone's wallet," she wrote. Cain ran after her and put a comforter around her. "He threw it around, grabbed me around my shoulders and stopped me from running."

Cain revealed that Shields had told him about including their intimate moment together in her memoir, out of respect. "I don’t think a girl loses her virginity. They give it... I mean, we were in love. She was a wonderful girl," he said on the Today show.

Cain and Shields in the late 1980s. Image: Getty.

Shields went on to marry tennis legend Andre Agassi in 1997. They divorced two years later, in 1999. She married television writer Chris Henchy in 2001 and they have two daughters together. 

Feature Image: Columbia Pictures/The Blue Lagoon.

This article was originally published on December 8, 2022 and was updated on December 22, 2022.

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