Wild Things nearly featured a very steamy sex scene between Matt Dillon and Kevin Bacon

Wild Things director John McNaughton has revealed that Matt Dillon and Kevin Bacon were originally meant to “go at it” in a steamy shower sex scene – but unfortunately, it didn’t make the final cut.

The 1998 thriller centres on a police detective (Kevin Bacon) investigating a case involving a high-school guidance counsellor (Matt Dillon) accused of rape by two high school students (Neve Campbell and Denise Richards).

At the end of the film, it’s revealed that the pair (Dillon and Bacon) are conspiring together against the two young women the entire time. But the pair were originally meant to be more than professionally involved.

Speaking to Yahoo Entertainment for the 1998 film’s 25th anniversary, director John McNaughton revealed that the two were originally meant to share a shower together, revealing that they were a couple.

“In the original version of the scene, Matt (Dillon) walks into his bathroom to take a shower and there’s Kevin (Bacon). They were supposed to look each other up and down and then wham — go at it.” 

On the day of filming, however, the scene in question got cut because one of the actors involved felt uncomfortable and objected to its inclusion.

McNaughton did not reveal which actor asked for the scene to be removed, but conceded defeat in the moment: “I love surprise, and I love stuff that I don’t see coming,” he says.

“But in that moment it was like ‘You win some, you lose some; we’re moving on’.”

Both Bacon and Dillon have previously spoken about the scrapped scene before, with Bacon suggesting that the decision to remove the kiss came down to an investor’s decision.

“Matt was gonna climb in the shower with me!” he told Total Film in a 2005 interview. “I thought it was great because the whole movie is about secrets coming out, right? As reveals go, that one was just huge.

“Unfortunately, the financiers didn’t like the idea of men making out. They felt it went too far. They felt it wasn’t right.”

Dillon, on the other hand, mentioned the scene in a less favourable light during his own interview with the publication.

“I was relieved when they got rid of that scene,” the actor remarked. “Kevin seemed pretty attached to it, though!”

As it stands, the scene features a full frontal of Bacon in the shower, anyway – but we can’t deny that a steamy shower sex scene would have been considerably Wild Thing.