Not every aspect of movie-making is glamorous — take it from Sophia Bush.
“I got to be mortified from the stands that day,” the actress, 43, told Us Weekly exclusively of a scene in her new film Summer’s Last Resort. “I’ve never been more relieved to be an observer of a scene.”
Bush stars as Milly in the Tubi film opposite Jerry O’Connell and Violet McGraw, who play her boyfriend and daughter, respectively, as they all try their best to get along on a tropical vacation. The scene in question involves O’Connell, 52, and McGraw, 15, trying to resuscitate a dolphin in hilarious fashion, while Bush’s character watches from the sidelines.
“When we had scenes with the dolphin and stuff, I was doing things that would mortify [Violet], would mortify my daughters,” O’Connell, who shares 17-year-old twin daughters Charlie and Dolly with his wife, Rebecca Romijn, joked to Us. “I was able to lean into it. I’m so afraid of my daughters. I live in fear of them. I’m afraid of even talking about them. When I got on Summer’s Last Resort, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m able to do the things I yearn to do as a dad, but I have to stop myself from doing because Violet has to be here. It’s her job.’”
McGraw concurred, adding that working with the dolphins was definitely “the most memorable for me.”
The movie is action-packed and filled with physical comedy, so it should come as no surprise that the dolphin scene wasn’t the only behind-the-scenes moment that pushed some boundaries.
“There really was a moment where I was like, I don’t know how long we should stay here,” Bush recalled of things getting chaotic during a “big” fire scene. “I think I’m going to remove her now and save us both? And we made it.”
But O’Connell didn’t come out of that one unscathed.
“I get nose hairs. Hairs grow out of my nose. It’s my family tree. My dad gets them, his father got them, I have them. My daughters will get them someday. When we were shooting that scene, I was 20 feet behind these two next to the fire, and I took a breath in, and my nose hairs… I could feel them burn,” he told Us. “I didn’t have to use [my trimmer] for like two weeks because that’s how hot it was.”
Admittedly, that wasn’t the actor’s only nasal incident on set. He joked that he “singed all my nose hairs” once again after catching a whiff of sardines on the dolphin’s breath.
“I kissed the dolphin and, I’m not kidding, no offense to dolphins, their breath the worst,” O’Connell said. “It’s just sardine breath, like in your face, and they have no concert of blow hole and mouth and everything. They think everyone wants to be near them.”
At the end of the day, the heart of the movie rests on the mother-daughter relationship between Milly and Summer, McGraw’s character.
“It was just kind of easy because she felt like my mom in real life and took such great care of me,” McGraw told Us of working with Bush.
For her part, the One Tree Hill alum added, “We’re playing a mother and daughter, but we’re also playing friends. It’s a really interesting dynamic. … We’re all very tight, and I think that grew naturally between us, but also for all of us as a group, because we were essentially at summer camp.”
She concluded: “We just had so much fun.”
Summer’s Last Resort premieres exclusively on Tubi Friday, July 3.
