Dallas star says TV cougar Linda Grays prank during controversial kiss left his lips numb

Christopher Atkins will never forget his on-screen kiss with TV “cougar” Linda Gray.The actor played camp counselor Peter Richards, the much younger lover of Gray’s Sue Ellen Ewing on the hit TV series “Dallas” from 1983 to 1984.The now 64-year-old, an aspiring filmmaker, is currently fundraising for an upcoming project.“They put me and Linda together, and she was the very first cougar,” Atkins told Fox News Digital.

“Our very first kissing scene, which solidified this moment between the two of us, was on a dock at this place on a lake.And everybody’s standing there watching.

Usually, everybody goes home after their scenes… They say, ‘Action,’ and we had our moment.We do have our big kiss, we pull apart and they cut.”“Linda says to me, ‘So how was it?’” he recalled.

“I’m thinking, ‘What am I supposed to say to that? Oh, it was terrible, let’s do it again? What do you say?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it was good.’ And then all of a sudden, my lips go completely numb.She, as a joke, had put on her lips all that… stuff that they numb your gums with before the dentist gives you the needle.

Put it all over her lips and gave me this kiss.”“That was my introduction to ‘Dallas,’” he chuckled.The steamy TV romance made headlines in its day.Sue Ellen, who was married to philandering oil tycoon J.R.

Ewing (played by Larry Hagman), was depicted sneaking about with her boy toy, USA Today reported.Atkins, 22, and Gray, 43, famously made the cover of US magazine with the headline, “Robbing the Cradle.”“I’ll never forget, I was walking… at a hotel, and this lady, you could see her, she’s staring at me,” he said.

“This woman starts coming straight at me, comes right up [to] my face and says, ‘You’re too young for her!’ This is what it was.And it was robbing the cradle.”Atkins described the cast of “Dallas” as pranksters — and no one left the studio unscathed.“They were all practical jokers,” ...