Real-life love can’t ever be like the movies, but that’s what makes it so much fun to live vicariously through movie characters.
In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, we’re thinking about our favorite movie couples. But not just any movie couples: sexy movie couples. The ones whose chemistry makes you positively soon.
Watch With Us combed through all of movie history, and we picked out what we believe are five of the sexiest movie couples of all time.
From the black-and-white world of Casablanca to the sci-fi dystopia of The Matrix, these couples make us go crazy.
Neo and Trinity — ‘The Matrix’ Movies
Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) don’t actually have sex until the second Matrix movie, during which their lovemaking is juxtaposed against an infamous orgy sequence. But the two manage to make things feel hot and bothered while barely touching each other in the first of the Matrix trilogy — and when they finally do kiss, sparks literally fly.
It’s a combination of how objectively hot Reeves and Moss are, sure, but it’s also how passionate and pure their love is for each other, and how over the course of the franchise that undying devotion somehow endures in that crazy world. By The Matrix Resurrections, we understand they are fated to each other, they would die for each other, and it’s a beautiful thing.
Chiron and Kevin — ‘Moonlight’ (2016)
Though Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) and Kevin (André Holland) never actually become a couple, their lasting, aching connection makes their dynamic both powerful and heartrending. Moonlight follows Chiron from childhood to adulthood through three pivotal moments in his life, in which he comes to understand his identity as a gay man.
As a teenager, he had a sexual encounter with Kevin that they never explored further or spoke of until years later. As adults, they reconnect, now living two very different lives but forever touched by what the other one meant to them. The truth and tragedy of unrealized passion is sometimes more beautiful and more intimate than visualized intimacy.
Jack and Rose — ‘Titanic’ (1997)
Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose Dewitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) may seem like the epitome of cringeworthy blockbuster melodrama, but if you just take three hours out of your day to actually watch Titanic, you’ll realize that “Paint me like one of your French girls” isn’t even really the sexiest moment between them.
The culmination of their patiently constructed romance is a deliriously erotic (if brief) scene in which Jack takes Rose in the back of a car in the ship’s cargo hold, whose windows fog up from how passionate and intense their lovemaking is. But that scene wouldn’t be what it is without the scintillating, slow-burn lead-up to their consummation — a culminating release felt by both the characters and the audience.
Elizabeth and Will — The ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ Franchise
It’s crazy to think that one of the sexiest movie couples ever came from a Disney movie, but the Mouse House doesn’t really make movies like Pirates of the Caribbean anymore, either. At the time, Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom were considered two of the hottest young actors in Hollywood, and putting them together for a romance anchored by emotional longing and a mutual transformation made for scintillating movie magic.
Will Turner is a blacksmith haunted by his father’s pirate ways, while Elizabeth is a governor’s daughter yearning to break free and harboring a lifelong fascination with pirates. In the end, Will basically becomes a pirate for her, and the two head off to have sexy little adventures together.
Rick and Ilsa — ‘Casablanca’ (1942)
“We’ll always have Paris” is one of the most emotionally ruinous lines of all time, from one of the classic movie couples that would never be. Humphrey Bogart once lit up screens with his weirdly sexy charm, and Ingrid Bergman was the woman everyone wanted (and wanted to be). Rick (Bogart) and Ilsa (Bergman) had a love affair that predated the events of Casablanca, but Ilsa reemerges in Rick’s life when she desperately needs his help.
Reconnecting, Rick and Ilsa find themselves not quite finished with one another, their love having never quite flamed out. But the fact that they can never really be together only makes their doomed affair more ardent, especially because Rick sacrifices their love for a greater cause. “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Cue swooning.
