Whether or not actors have chemistry on-screen might also be thought to be a natural result of the sort of relationships that they have behind the scenes. Given the barely suppressed passion between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s characters in Cleopatra, the idea that they really were having an affair was more popular than the film itself (and more accurate, as it turns out). The Amazing Spider-Man’s Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield have been dating since 2011 and the relationship that developed between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie during the filming of Mr. and Mrs. Smith was enough to put an end to what had been until then Mr. and Mrs. Pitt. Ryan Gosling claimed that his relationship with his The Notebook co-star Rachel McAdams was actually even more intense off-screen than it was on. God only knows what they were doing.
But then we have examples like Gigli. This is the film that gave rise to the infamous ‘Bennifer’ pairing of Ben Afleck and Jennifer Lopez (and incidentally to the ridiculous merging of celebrity names). This is also the film that was – among everything else about it that was criticized (plot, script, continuity, script, directing, script) – most soundly slammed for the complete and utter lack of any plausible connection between its two stars. Maybe it was because they were calling themselves Bennifer. In any case – ouch. (Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise also failed during the filming of Eyes Wide Shut to convey the fact that they were married in real life, but given that Stanley Kubrick apparently used their marriage as a model for the troubles of the fictional characters, and that they divorced two years later, we’ll let them off this one).
Lastly, chemistry doesn’t even seem to depend on there being any physical contact at all. Not to get too basic about this, but the pornography industry isn’t exactly known for the chemistry between its actors. But it is actually this point that might turn out to be the most revealing. Having looked at the more obvious characteristics of chemistry – sex, attractiveness, skill – none of them have so far been very reliable. The only thing that is consistent is that we still can’t see what it is. So maybe this is the first part of the answer itself. Maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong place, and what is most important for chemistry is actually not the recognizable, familiar stuff at all but something that is not immediately obvious, that exists in the things that don’t happen, or the things that aren’t being said.
This theory is actually remarkably easy to test, mainly because it is often used as a specific story device; there are just as many movies where the success of the relationship depends on it being limited in some way and they are just as well known. It is what has given poignancy to the classic story of love in the wrong place and time all the way from Brief Encounter to Drive and what leads us every time we watch Romeo and Juliet to hope that by now someone’s found a couple of missing pages from the back of Shakespeare’s jotter and this is the time that it might all work out. An Affair to Remember would probably have been a film to forget if Deborah Kerr had made it to the Empire State Building that day. The brilliant rapport between the titular characters in When Harry Met Sally works precisely because they intentionally spend [most of] the entire time avoiding sleeping together.
It is also a well-known fact that changing the nature of these sorts of relationships is a highly dangerous game. If ever there was a misfire in the admittedly murky field of bringing TV to the big screen, it was when the second movie adaptation of the 1990’s TV series The X-Files (The X Files; I Want to Believe) was released – but what was interesting about that failure was that I Want to Believe included something that the original series had not and that viewers had been desperately wanting for nearly a decade; an established romantic relationship between Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.
During its enormously successful nine year run on television, The X Files basically owned the book on character chemistry, creating one of the biggest ‘shipper’ fan bases in TV history on the basis that the two people barely went anywhere near each other. Even Scully’s pregnancy in season 8 had not explicitly involved Mulder and Scully actually being together. Unless Chris Carter was in drastic need of a refresher course in the birds and the bees, he had been exactly right to do this. A romance between Mulder and Scully was not enough to save I Want to Believe from being criticized even by the show’s most die-hard of fans; it was the denial of the relationship that had been the show’s driving force.