Daryl Hannah looks back – with mixed emotions – on the shoot Splash 40 years ago.
“Oh, my God, it’s so embarrassing,” she recalls exclusively to PEOPLE of one of her first films, made when she was in her early twenties. “I was really naive.”
In particular, Hannah, now 63, remembers the scene in which she kisses on-screen lover Tom Hanks. In rehearsal with director Ron Howard, she says she kept skipping the kiss moment out of sheer awkwardness.
“Once you do it once, the second time is easier,” says the actress with a laugh. “But that first time, when you don’t know someone and you have to kiss them, it’s so awkward. At least it was for me.”
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As a mermaid who sheds her fins to join the humans on land and names herself Madison (after New York’s Madison Avenue), Hannah’s discomfort on set Splash it was not unjustified. A few scenes called for skin to be exposed, which it is Kill Bill star says it “really upset” her.
“I traveled the world, but at the same time I was sheltered,” the Chicago-born actress tells PEOPLE. “I didn’t really have a boyfriend yet… so I was incredibly worried about any nudity.”
Daryl Hannah and Tom Hanks in the movie “Splash”.
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Howard and his team “came in with my hair covering my chest,” she recalls, “because they didn’t want me to have any kind of, I don’t know, shell swimsuit top or something—which I understood.” For the underwater scenes, she says, “I would just make sure my hair is stuck to my chest.”
Hannah adds that she “loved filming the whole thing”, especially in her elaborate mermaid tail prosthetics – despite it being so “incredibly painful” out of the water.
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As the aquatic Madison, Howard recalls, the actress “was very, very athletic and also very relaxed about nudity.”
The actor and director, 70, tells PEOPLE that Hannah “realized it was just something we needed to do for the movie. But she understood her character as a creature, a very natural, organic, free-spirited creature. And she made so much possible. It was amazing.”
He also remembers that Splash the team opted for “a bandage or some kind of paste or something that was stuck to her breasts” to navigate the nudity of the Disney film. “Then her hair was glued to it. So wherever she swam, the hair would always be there, but she wasn’t too worried about it.”
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Daryl Hannah and Tom Hanks in the movie “Splash”. Touchstone/Kobal/Shutterstock
The scene with the most bare skin, as Hannah recalls, was when Madison crawled out of the ocean and approached the tourists from New York. “When I’m at the Statue of Liberty, you see my ass,” he jokes. “But then, everyone has an ass! So I guess it’s not that bad.”
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Splash, which also starred Hanks, Eugene Levy and the late John Candy, became one of the highest-grossing films of 1984 and earned an Academy Award nomination for the original screenplay by Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel and Bruce Jay Friedman. Hannah continued to act Roxanne, Wall Street, Steel Magnolias and Kill Bill movies.
Asked if she has any acting projects on the horizon, Hannah tells PEOPLE, “I’m really happy making movies” as a director. In 2023, she was nominated for a Grammy Award for directing Band, brotherhood, stablea music documentary featuring Neil Young’s husband and his band Crazy Horse.
“I kind of get sick to my stomach when I see trailers and base camps, when I drive by movie sets,” she admits. “I think I’ve had enough bumpy experiences that it kind of affected me in a weird way.”
Although she doesn’t want to act on screen again, Hannah says it’s a level project Splash it might answer, “I guess I could do it if something really cool came along that I thought would transform me in that way.”
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Source: HIS Education