Rebel Wilson Shares How Kissing A Woman In New Film Changed Her Life

Rebel Wilson is opening up about the first woman she kissed and how it changed her whole life.

The Pitch Perfect star was coerced into publicly announcing her relationship with Ramona Agruma over the summer, marking the first time she had ever dated a woman. But prior to that, she had starred in a new film, The Almond and the Seahorse, in which one of her love interests was played by Charlotte Gainsbourg.

“I was so nervous,” Wilson admitted to The Hollywood Reporter. “I’d never kissed a woman before so I was thinking, ‘Oh God, how’s that going to go?’”

In the movie, Wilson plays an archeologist helping her husband (Celyn Jones) helping her husband recover from a traumatic brain injury when she meets and grows close to a woman (Gainsbourg) going through a similar experience with her own wife (Trine Dyrholm).

The Almond and the Seahorse is based on the play of the same name, but in that iteration, both couples are heterosexual, and the budding relationship grows between the male and female leads.

The queer turn taken by the film adaptation came about due to a combination of Pierce Brosnan’s schedule not working out and Wilson herself suggesting a woman step into the role instead — and now she credits that experience with helping her be open to starting a relationship with Agruma when she met her later the same year.

“Weirdly through kissing her in my professional life I thought, well, maybe I should do that for real in my personal life and see how it goes, which I did,” she recalled. “If I hadn’t had the experience with Charlotte… I don’t know if I would have ever met Romana. Having those experiences opened my heart up to it as a possibility.”

“It changed my love life completely. It’s such an awesome thing,” Wilson added.

She also told THR that she has several actor friends who have had similar experiences — playing queer or kissing a woman in a role and it helping them realize they weren’t as heterosexual as they initially thought.

In a world where people are taking unyielding stances about whether only out queer actors should be able to play queer roles, and whether taking a role like that obligates an actor to come out, hearing a story that blasts through that rigid approach to acting serves as a good reminder that art can be about exploration — even for the people making it.