Awkward Kisses That Happened During Interviews

Watching sexual tension between two older individuals can feel a little awkward for viewers almost any time, but you could imagine how it must have felt to audiences back in 1994, before men kissing on TV was a pretty normal thing. Typically hard-nosed interviewer Larry King spent the better part of 90 minutes flirting with a 70-year-old Marlon Brando, hitting him in the head with note cards and adorning him with flattery like, "Time goes so fast with you."

Brando, for his part, played right back, at one point dabbing the suspenders-donning host's head with a towel when he started to sweat up and leading him into a duet of "I Can't Get Started." Brando, for his part, looked hardly the heartthrob of his A Streetcar Named Desire days, and The Washington Post described him as "a somewhat dissolute Roman Emperor ... From the waist down, he appeared sloppy and corpulent."

As the hour-and-a-half love fest finished, King and Brando broke into another duet, this time stammering through "Got a Date With an Angel." When they finished, Brando turned to King and said, "Darling, goodbye," and the two pecked on the mouth. The moment stuck with King, who in 2010 told New York Magazine's Laura Ingraham that he still "can't stop thinking about it."

The NBA preseason is often a less formal time for the league, and that goes just as much for interviews as it does for what happens on the court. This informality was especially evident before a 2014 game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Dallas Mavericks, when Cavs player Tristan Thompson was engaging in some sideline chatter with reporter Allie Clifton.

After rattling off the usual collection of sports interview clichés, Thompson confusingly said, "You know how I do, Tina," and winked at the camera. Thompson then flashed an oversized grin before leaning in and kissing the side of Clifton's head. "He just goes off the feel of the game. Just like he does with interviews, I guess," Mills said to close the awkward interview.

Some found it funny. Some did not, as Yahoo! Sports writer Kelly Dwyer said it could be "a mortifying thing for this reporter, and Thompson couldn't be more in the wrong." Clifton, however, seemed to shrug it off, tweeting shortly afterward, "@RealTristan thing was inside joke & not a big deal. We have a good working relationship. All is good."

Ah, the Tour de Flanders. Long considered not just a cycling race but a place for accidental lovers to finally realize their destiny. No? Well that almost seemed the case ahead of the 2019 race, when reporter Linde Merckpoel was interviewing Belgian cyclist Stijn Steels about the upcoming Tour.

As the interview was ending, Merckpoel put her arm around the cyclist and leaned in to give him a farewell peck on the cheek. Steels had the same idea, turning toward Merckpoel, and suddenly they shared an on-camera kiss. Both recoiled in shock, but seemed to share a laugh.

The reporter tweeted out the video with the caption, "Sorry baby. I can explain." Steels, for his part, gained newfound notoriety from the incident, telling Flemish newspaper Het Nieuwsblad, as reported by the The Sun, "I have received a huge number of text messages. On Instagram, even people from Russia, Germany and so on have sent me a message. In Russia that video has been viewed more than two million times." He added, "I have driven a super bad course, but have never received so much attention." 

Moral of the story: If you know you can't win, kiss a reporter before the race and no one will remember who did.

Dads embarrassing you in public is usually limited to wearing socks that go past the knees or a shirt he owned 50 pounds ago. But this is not the case if you're Jaden Smith, whose father, Will Smith, thought giving him a mouth kiss on live TV was a perfectly dad-like thing to do. The Smiths went on Thailand's The Woody Show to promote their new movie After Earth in 2013. There the elder Smith grabbed his son by the face and planted one right on his lips.

It may not have been the usual form of paternal affection some of us are used to, but apparently it isn't at all unusual at the Smith house. "That happens all the time," Jaden said later in an interview with Hip Hollywood. "After the set, he'll try and kiss me. Or anywhere else."

Howard Stern is no stranger to pushing the boundaries of appropriateness on his own show. But during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2019, he pushed the boundaries there too, cajoling the woman who pioneered women kissing women on TV into kissing him. Somewhat surprisingly, it may have been a good PR move for both of them.

Prior to Stern's appearance, Ellen DeGeneres had caught some heat for sitting with former president George W. Bush at a football game. And though DeGeneres defended herself to her audience, saying, "I'm friends with a lot of people who don't share the same beliefs that I have. We're all different and I think that we've forgotten that that's ok that we're all different," the story stayed top of mind (via E! News). Enter Stern, who had a bright idea to shift the focus to something far less controversial.

"What you need to do, in my opinion, is take a picture with me, making out with me," Stern said, his wife, Beth, sitting in the audience. "Once people see me with you, no one's going to be thinking about George Bush." DeGeneres balked and tried to change the subject, but eventually Stern got his kiss. "I think there was tongue," he said, which DeGeneres very much denied.

You don't need to have watched a single episode of the Australian version of The Bachelorette to fully appreciate comedic awkwardness of a tatted-up Brit getting a big wet one from an Australian firefighter. Jamie Doran (the firefighter) and Ciarran Stott (the tatted-up Brit) were former contestants on the show, who agreed to do a video interview with Aussie talk show The Project after they'd both left The Bachelorette.

Project host Gorgi Coghlan asked Doran to give Stott a hug, as he'd had to leave The Bachelorette when his grandmother suddenly passed away. "I'd love to," Doran replied. Then after embracing Stott, he put an awkward kiss right on his cheek. Stott leaned away, recoiling in disgust.

"Don't get on a stage five with me now, pal," he said after breaking away from the hug. The comment is especially funny for fans of the show, as Yahoo! Lifestyle reported that Doran became known as a "stage five clinger," for his intense attachment to Bachelorette Angie Kent.

Sometimes you've just gotta shoot your shot, even when you're an Oscar-winning Dame in her majesty's court. Such was the logic of Dame Helen Mirren when she appeared on The Late Show in 2016, giving the usual introductory handshake... and then kissing host Stephen Colbert. And this was all before she even sat down. Mirren gracefully moved on, gave the audience a little shrug, then beckoned the still-stunned Colbert to join her at his desk since he didn't seem to know where to go.

"If I didn't do it then, I'd never get to do it," the Prime Suspect star said as Colbert regained composure. "I have been dreaming of doing that for about 15 years. I just grabbed my chance. I'm sorry." Colbert didn't seem to mind though, saying it was "one of the nicest greetings" a guest had ever given him.

"Helen Mirren came out and, without any warning, kissed me on the lips, passionately with her hand on the back of my head, and everything has been downhill from then," he later said of the kiss during an interview on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.