05/09/2024
Christopher Atkins: "I couldn't go anywhere. I had my hair pulled and my clothes ripped off of me several times. To this day, people still recognize me. I'm still fighting the image I have from 'The Blue Lagoon' (1980)."
It was "The Blue Lagoon" director Randall Kleiser's original concept to have the two grown characters play the entire film in the n**e, which scared off many actors (including Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was the first choice for the female lead). After Leigh passed on the project, the producers offered Diane Lane and Willie Aames the film after screen-testing them together in Mexico, where Lane was shooting a Western...but the pair discussed the nudity together after the crew left and called a few days later to say they wouldn't do the film, either. With shooting set to begin in a matter of days, the desperate director agreed to let Brooke Shields make the film predominantly clothed, with a body double employed for the n**e scenes. With that settled, the casting director returned to the thousands of audition tapes they had made over the course of a year, and decided Christopher Atkins would be all right if he permed his hair to look more savage.
Shields was 14 years of age when she appeared in the film.All of her n**e scenes were performed by the film's 32-year-old stunt coordinator, Kathy Troutt. Shields did many of her topless scenes with her hair glued to her breasts. Atkins was 18 when the movie was filmed, and he performed his own n**e scenes (which included brief frontal nudity).
"Let me tell you something: if you're on an island for three and a half months and you're four and a half hours by boat from the nearest store, and there's nobody but 30 crew members on the island, I guarantee that you'd be running around without your clothes on."
After seeing the movie, John Gibbons, a herpetologist (reptile scientist) at the University of the South Pacific, realized that the iguanas that appeared in the film were a distinct species that had never been seen or documented by scientists before. Afterward, Gibbons visited Nanuya Levu, the Fiji Island where the movie was made, and named the species the Fiji Crested Iguana. (IMDb/Wikipedia)
Happy Birthday, Christopher Atkins!
