A week before filming, Aaron Sorkin was told to write a Nicole Kidman sex scene — he calls what came out of it ‘just crude’
Sorkin told The New York Times that Harold Becker wanted the scene a week before shooting began on Malice.
Here's one for the film trivia vaults: Aaron Sorkin, the man behind The Social Network and The West Wing, still cringes thinking about a particular chapter from his earlier days. Turns out, there’s a movie he’d rather we all forgot he wrote—namely, the 1993 crime thriller Malice, and especially the awkward sex scene he says he was pushed to write for Nicole Kidman and Alec Baldwin.
‘Everything went wrong’
Sorkin opened up to The New York Times while chatting about his new project, and took a detour down memory lane to the early ‘90s. He describes being a young screenwriter suddenly tasked with spicing things up, whether he fancied it or not. With just a week left before filming started on Malice, the director Harold Becker apparently decided the R-rated script needed to be steamier. Sorkin found himself ordered to dash off to his hotel room and dream up a sex scene for the film's stars, which left him less than enthused.
Here’s how Sorkin described the situation in his own words, reflecting on the pressure from Becker to deliver the goods:
We need a sex scene with Alec and Nicole. It’s ridiculous that there’s no sex scene with Alec and Nicole. So I want you to go to your hotel room and write one.
The best Sorkin could muster was some flirtation, maybe a sly cut to the next morning. Becker wasn’t having it, pushing for something much more explicit. The request? Just write whatever you’d want to see Nicole Kidman do. Sorkin says he ended up refusing to go that far, chalking up the whole experience as ‘not sexy,’ not even the least bit erotic—just crude, and frankly, poor writing. Not exactly the Sorkin standard we’d expect, but then, the early ‘90s were a different beast altogether.
When Malice flopped
To add insult to injury, Malice went down about as well as a lukewarm cup of tea with both critics and the public. On top of Kidman and Baldwin, the cast list is pretty stacked—there’s Bill Pullman, Bebe Neuwirth, George C. Scott, Anne Bancroft, Peter Gallagher, Josef Sommer, and Tobin Bell all popping up. Still, even with that much talent packed in, the end result was hardly a crowd-pleaser.
Malice currently holds a Rotten Tomatoes critic score of 54% and an audience score of just 46%.
The lack of affection from audiences didn’t help matters at the box office either. Even with its big names and R-rated drama, Malice eked out a global take just north of $46 million while in cinemas.