Kissing: it might be typical between you and your partner, but when you’re in a new relationship , or haven’t actually kissed anyone before, it can be incredibly nerve-wracking . This awkwardness extends to celebrities , too.
Whether the kiss takes place on-screen or off, it seems like celebs can be just as awkward as the rest of us. Here are some of their best stories.
Shailene Woodley
Woodley described a feeling of growing up fast when she had her first kiss at the age of 15: “I was the latest bloomer there ever was. I was still playing with Barbies at 14 and didn’t have my first kiss until 15-and-a-half. He had big, beautiful lips, and I was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with those,'” said Woodley.
Taylor Swift
T-Swift was fairly understated when she discussed her first kiss with Tiger Beat , saying , “I was 15. I was one of the last of my friends to ever kiss a guy. I ended up dating him for a year. It wasn’t bad, I think it was cute.”
Kirsten Dunst
Dunst’s first kiss came at the age of 11 with her Interview with the Vampire co-star Brad Pitt, who was 30 at the time. She acknowledged the weirdness, saying , “I thought it was disgusting. I was 11; it would have been weird if I was like, ‘This is amazing, I’m kissing Brad Pitt.’ Then I think people would have thought I was a little bit off … There was no tongue though, it was literally, like, so PC.”
Khloé Kardashian
Kardashian’s first kiss was a fairly relatable experience.
“It was on a family vacation in Hawaii when I was 12 or 13,” she said . “The teenagers were allowed to be out until 10 p.m., and we were in an arcade where the hotel kids hung out. I remember I kissed some guy there, and I thought I was so cool and so grown. I don’t remember the boy, and I can’t tell you anything else about the experience.”
Justin Bieber
“I think I was like 11 or 12,” Bieber told Nickelodeon. “We weren’t dating yet, we were just hanging out a lot, and we went to the snow hill. It was at the school, and there was a hill. So we were at the top, and it was nighttime. I had never kissed a girl, and then I was just like, ‘All right I’m gonna go in.’ I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Charlize Theron
Did anyone else have a first kiss with someone wearing braces? Charlize Theron did . “He had braces. We were in the backyard … We just had watched Friday the 13th. What a real romance movie! So we were just standing there because it was so planned. Like ‘Okay, you’re gonna come over, watch a movie, then we kiss,'” Theron explained. “His name was Nicky. We were standing in the backyard, and I’m like, ‘You wanna do it, you wanna do it? Well, okay, then let’s do it.’ And we’re standing there arguing about it for so long, it was just awful. But then it was darkness, saliva and tongue. I was 12, I think, 12 or 13.”
Ed Sheeran
“My first kiss with tongues was probably like everyone’s first kiss with tongue. I think if you watched a lot of One Tree Hill or The O.C. , your first kiss with tongue would probably be on point because you’d studied it, but I hadn’t seen any of those programs,” Sheeran told ANDPOP. “I think the first kiss I saw on TV was in a James Bond movie, where Pierce Brosnan just goes in with tongue, so yeah, it was one of them! Very awkward and wet.”
Selena Gomez
“I was obsessed with [ The Suite Life of Zack & Cody ], and I thought [Dylan Sprouse and I] were going to be together,” Gomez told Kelly Clarkson. “It was my first kiss — on-camera! It was one of the worst days of my life.”
Nick Jonas
One of the Jonas Bros had his first kiss with fellow teen idol Miley Cyrus. “I kissed her outside of California Pizza Kitchen in Hollywood — very romantic. I’d just had a pizza that had onions all over it. I’m sure that my breath smelled terrible. I’d have to ask her [if she remembers]. But I’m sure she does. It was probably pretty potent,” he said .
Gigi Hadid
As Hadid tells it, her first kiss was something to get over with. “My first kiss was at my friend’s house. We were watching a movie — I want to say it was a horror movie — and I was with the guy that I liked. I was about 14 or 15, we both had braces. And my friend and the guy that she liked left the room, so we had our first kiss and it was horrible and awkward,” she explained . “You know, lots of metal happening. I was happy to wait a while til our next kiss. I think it was more about our first kiss thing, than actually wanting to kiss him all the time.”
Robert Pattinson
“It was on the roof of a building around the corner from my house in London. [I was] 11 or 12. That’s quite old, isn’t it? I guess it was a girlfriend,” Pattinson explained . “We used to walk home from school together. And I remember being like, ‘What does my mouth taste like?’ afterwards. Like, really romantic. ‘Does it taste like marmite?’ I think we dated for a bit until it was revealed to me … She was like, ‘Oh, no. I started dating someone else.’ I’m like, ‘Wait, what?!'”
Kate Beckinsale
Beckinsale’s first kiss was, in a word, bleak.
“It was so bleak. I’m surprised I ever kissed anyone again after that. I was quite a late bloomer … All my friends had done it. I thought, well, I’m going to have to kiss somebody, otherwise I’m weird. I was at a party and the person who wanted to kiss me was American , of course. It led me on a terrible path I’m now stuck on,” she told James Corden.
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“Anyway, I was a really militant vegetarian at the time and he had just eaten a meat lover’s pizza. So, massive trauma. I thought kissing was a dry experience but as it was happening I realized, oh, there’s all that kind of wet activity inside the other person’s mouth, with lots of bits of sausages in as well.”
Zac Efron
Were you stoked after your first kiss? Zac Efron sure was. Speaking to Seventeen , he said , “I want to say [my first kiss was in] fifth grade. It was in a tree fort. It was over a game of Truth or Dare, but turned into ‘make out with the other person.’ I was, like, the only boy, and there was a bunch of girls. I was pretty stoked.”
Rihanna
Rihanna’s first kiss was so bad it was almost enough to stop her from ever kissing anyone ever again: “My first kiss was in high school and it was the worst thing, ever. He pretty much dumped his entire saliva glands into my mouth. It traumatized me. I didn’t kiss for, like, ever,” she told Rolling Stone .
Billie Eilish
Eilish apparently didn’t set anyone’s world on fire with her first kiss. “Right after we kissed, he says, ‘Wow, that was really not as magical at all as I thought it was going to be,” she said in an interview with Cosmopolitan .
Zayn Malik
One Direction’s Zayn Malik had his first kiss at the age of 13. Apparently, there was a bit of a height disparity.
“I was really short and she was really tall, so I had to put a brick against the wall and stand on it to reach her face,” he told Seventeen .
Brad Pitt
“Her name was Lisa. It was in her garage. She was one street over, and I ran home afterward,” said Pitt. “I was pretty excited — the anticipation was a bit nerve-wracking. A few kids were already in on it.”
Halle Berry
Berry’s first kiss was more of an information-gathering session as she explains it: “My first kiss was a girl. I had this boyfriend named LaShawn Boyd and I wanted to French kiss him. But I didn’t know how to French kiss, so I got my best girlfriend at the time to show me how to French kiss, so I could French kiss him. So she came over to my house and kissed me for like 30 minutes. Literally showed me how to French kiss a boy. And then the next night, I went and French kissed LaShawn Boyd.”
Emily Blunt
“I spun the bottle, it landed on Ashley, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is it,'” Blunt said .
“Now, I had heard about the concept of French kissing but I thought: ‘Why would that be pleasurable or nice?’ And it wasn’t. I was just horrified by the whole thing. I just remember surreptitiously wiping my mouth afterwards. It was horrible.
Mila Kunis
Kunis and hubby Ashton Kutcher are a bonafide Hollywood power couple, but things weren’t always that way.
“I was like, ‘Oh, he’s so cute, it’s the Calvin Klein model!’ Then I was like, ‘I have to kiss him?’ I was so nervous and uncomfortable. I had the biggest crush on him,” she said .
