Patrick Swayze’s Widow Lisa Niemi on Dirty Dancing Sequel, More Secrets

7. A turning point for the actors came during the film’s iconic lift scene in the lake, Swayze and Grey bonding over the difficult experience.

“It was horrifyingly, hypothermically cold in that lake, and we filmed that scene over and over,” Swayze wrote in his autobiography. “And despite the fact that Jennifer was very light, when you’re lifting someone in water, even the skinniest little girl can feel like 500 pounds.”

8. But all their hard work proved to be worth it, with Grey reflecting on finally nailing the lift with Swayze in her 2022 memoir, Out of the Corner, that she held off doing the infamous move until they filmed the climactic final dance scene. 

“What you see between us in that scene was also real,” she wrote. “Real gratitude. Real respect. Real care. If that’s not love, what is?”

9. The scene in which Baby keeps laughing as Johnny trails his fingers down her arm was unscripted as Grey really was ticklish and Swayze’s annoyance was very real. 

“We didn’t even remember we had that footage because we then shot it where she didn’t laugh, and it was only when we were in the editing room that our dance editor found this,” Bergstein told Cosmo. “When we saw it, we burst out laughing, and when Jennifer and Patrick saw it for the first time, they burst out laughing because we’d completely forgotten that this had even happened. We just thought it was so funny that we used it and loved it.”