Sally Field Says This Co-Star Was Her Worst Onscreen Kiss: "A Lot of Drooling"
Ava White
Updated on February 22, 2026
Sally Field's just opened up about her worst onscreen kiss, and it just so happens to have been with someone she shared some real-life kisses with, too. During a Dec. 1 appearance on Watch What Happens Live, the 76-year-old actor was asked by a fan if she would share the co-star she found to be the worst kisser, since she'd already named the actor who gave her her best onscreen kiss: James Garner.
Field was apprehensive about divulging the name at first, but eventually named someone she had a connection to outside of their late 1970s movie. Read on to see what she had to say.
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Field's best movie kiss was with James Garner.
The Watch What Happens Live caller noted that Field had revealed in the past that her best onscreen kiss was with Garner. They starred together in 1985's Murphy's Romance, a romantic comedy about a couple with a large age gap.
Field opened up about kissing Garner on a Watch What Happens Live episode from 2016. "Best, without a doubt, was James Garner," she said. "I mean, hands down. He gets it … I can, like, close my eyes and go there."
Her worst movie kiss was with an off-screen ex.
When Field was asked about her worst onscreen kiss in the new WWHL episode, she responded, "Oh boy. Shall I really name names here?
Host Andy Cohen and fellow guest Idina Menzel encouraged her, and Field gave in. "This is gonna be a shocker, hold on folks: Burt Reynolds," she said.
Reynolds and Field collaborated in four films, but their first was 1977's Smokey and the Bandit.
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She had one major complaint.
Cohen asked Field, "Weren't you dating?" And while they did end up in a relationship, the actors first got together on the set of the film. Field thought the kiss onscreen might be different from their others.
"I tried to look over, look the other way and say, 'Well, that was just then,'" she explained. "It just was not something he did very well. I could go into detail, but you don't want to hear it."
Pressing her to actually give those details, Cohen asked if the problem was "the tongue." Field said, "Not totally involved, just a lot of drooling was involved."
Field and Reynolds were together for five years.
After Smokey and the Bandit, Field and Reynolds made three more movies during their five-year relationship: The End, Hooper, and Smokey and the Bandit II.
In a 2015 interview with Vanity Fair, Reynolds called Field the "love of my life." He said, "I don't know why I was so stupid. Men are like that, you know. You find the perfect person, and then you do everything you can to screw it up."
Field said in a 2022 interview with Variety, four years after Reynolds died, that he had been putting more importance on the relationship than was actually there.
"He was just not good for me in any way," she said. "And he had somehow invented in his rethinking of everything that I was more important to him than he had thought, but I wasn't. He just wanted to have the thing he didn't have. I just didn't want to deal with that."
Field named a different worst kisser in a previous interview.
In her 2016 interview on Watch What Happens Live, Field gave a different answer about her worst onscreen kiss.
"Probably the worst would have to be—and he's probably improved, I don't know—but it was Tommy Lee Jones in a bad phase of his life," Field said. She kissed Jones in 1981's Back Roads. Later, they both appeared in 2012's Lincoln.
"Bless his heart. I adore him," Field continued. "But years later when we saw each other, he came up to me, and said, 'I apologize.' So, just as a kind of overall theme of things, you know."
Lia Beck Lia Beck is a writer living in Richmond, Virginia. In addition to Best Life, she has written for Refinery29, Bustle, Hello Giggles, InStyle, and more.Read moreFiled Under1970s • Celebrities • Entertainment • NewsRead This NextSee Young Forrest From "Forrest Gump" Now
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