Amy Adams Just Reminded the Entire Planet Why Kissing Henry Cavill Was One of the Funniest Disasters in Hollywood History, and the Internet Is Living for Every Second of It

Sixteen years after Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian stormed theaters and turned the Smithsonian into the most chaotic after-hours playground in cinematic history, one single moment from that film has roared back to life and taken over every social platform in existence, because Amy Adams finally told the unfiltered, laugh-out-loud truth about what it was really like to kiss Henry Cavill on camera. And the world is absolutely not recovering.

It all started with a now-immortal clip from her 2018 appearance on The Graham Norton Show, a segment that has quietly lived on YouTube for years but suddenly exploded again this month, racking up an additional 31 million views in the past ten days alone after someone stitched it with footage from the actual movie kiss. In the clip, Adams, radiant in a deep green dress and armed with that trademark self-deprecating sparkle, leans forward on the famous red sofa and delivers the line that instantly became part of pop-culture scripture: “Henry Cavill is so tall that when we had to kiss, I literally had to climb him. It was like making out with a very handsome, very polite tree.”

The studio audience detonated. Graham Norton clutched his chest like he’d been shot with Cupid’s arrow made of pure second-hand embarrassment. And the internet, well, the internet turned it into a full-blown movement.

Because here’s the reality that only the people on set truly understood at the time: Amy Adams stands at a perfectly lovely 5-foot-4, while Henry Cavill towers at 6-foot-1, which translates to a nine-inch difference that might not seem catastrophic on paper but becomes an absolute comedy of physics the moment a script demands that their faces meet in a romantic, sweeping, camera-circling embrace. And in Shawn Levy’s 2009 sequel, the script demanded exactly that, multiple times, between Adams’ fearless, whip-smart Amelia Earhart and Cavill’s gloriously intense, slightly deranged Sir Lancelot.

What the audience saw on screen was pure movie magic: a windswept, golden-hour kiss atop a vintage biplane soaring over the Washington Monument, the sunrise painting everything in heroic hues while Amelia finally gives in to the medieval knight who has been chasing her through half the museum. What actually happened on set was a three-hour ordeal involving apple boxes, camera tricks, a very patient Henry Cavill bending at increasingly alarming angles, and an entire crew trying not to laugh while Amy Adams essentially performed an interpretive dance just to reach his face.

According to multiple members of the production who were there that day in Vancouver, the crew tried everything. They started with subtle platforms disguised as part of the cockpit floor. They attempted clever blocking where Amy would be seated and Henry would lean down dramatically. They even experimented with having Henry stand in a shallow trench (he politely declined, citing “knight’s honor”). In the end, the winning solution was gloriously old-school: Henry crouched, Amy reached, and they both laughed so hard between takes that the sound department had to keep rolling just to capture the genuine joy that eventually made it into the final cut.

Adams has never been shy about the chaos. In press tours for the film she openly joked that the height difference was “the real villain of the movie,” and years later, when she and Cavill were reunited for Man of Steel and Batman v Superman (where she played Lois Lane to his Superman), she greeted him on set with a step stool as a gag gift, wrapped in a bow that read “For old times’ sake.” Cavill, ever the gentleman, accepted it with a grin and immediately posed for a photo holding the stool like Excalibur.

The irony is almost too perfect to be real: the same two actors who spent an entire day in 2008 trying not to topple over while attempting a simple kiss would go on to portray one of the most iconic romantic pairings in superhero history, complete with slow-motion rescues, rain-soaked reunions, and a kiss in the ruins of Metropolis that is still used as the gold standard for cinematic chemistry. Yet even then, the height jokes never stopped. During the Man of Steel press junket, when a reporter asked about their previous collaboration, Adams deadpanned, “Second time around we were professionals. We brought a ladder. And a spotter. And liability insurance.”

Cavill has leaned into the legend with the grace of someone who knows he will never live it down and is perfectly okay with that. When the Graham Norton clip resurfaced last year, he reposted it to his Instagram stories with a single ladder emoji and the caption “Still sorry, Amy. Still bending.” When a fan account made a side-by-side comparison of the Night at the Museum kiss versus the Man of Steel kiss, he commented, “Progress. We upgraded from apple boxes to actual flight rigs.”

And that, perhaps, is why this story refuses to die. In an era where every celebrity moment is filtered, curated, and focus-grouped into oblivion, Amy Adams handed us something gloriously, hilariously human: a five-time Oscar nominee admitting that sometimes even the most beautiful on-screen romances are just two very nice people trying desperately not to fall over while a hundred crew members pretend they’re not watching.

The internet has turned it into art. TikTok is flooded with couples recreating the moment: girlfriends standing on chairs, boyfriends crouching dramatically, entire friend groups staging elaborate “Amy climbing Henry” skits complete with airplane sound effects and fake mustaches. One video with 58 million views shows a 5-foot-2 bride surprising her 6-foot-5 groom at their wedding reception by producing a step stool for their first kiss, with the caption “For Amy Adams.” Henry Cavill reportedly watched it, laughed for a full minute, and sent the couple a congratulatory video holding his own step stool “in solidarity.”

Even Shawn Levy, the director who orchestrated the entire glorious mess, got in on the fun. When asked about it during a recent retrospective interview, he simply said, “We shot that scene thirty-seven times, and twenty-nine of those takes are just Amy and Henry corpsing. We kept the best one, but honestly? The outtakes are comedy gold. One day the world will see them, and humanity will never recover.”

So the next time you rewatch Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and reach that perfect, sweeping kiss atop the biplane, remember what really happened: somewhere off-camera there was an apple box, a very patient British giant, and a redheaded legend who turned a logistical nightmare into one of the most endearing love stories Hollywood never meant to tell.

Thank you, Amy, for never letting us believe the fairy tale was easy. Thank you for proving that even when the leading man is built like a Greek statue, sometimes the real magic happens when the princess has to stand on a box to reach him.

And thank you, Henry, for bending, literally and figuratively, every single time.

The tree and the climber. Sixteen years later, still the greatest love story never scripted.