The Iconic Heathers Line That Shannen Doherty Absolutely Refused To Say

Teen comedies were a hugely successful subgenre for Hollywood studios throughout most of the 1980s. Films like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Risky Business," and the myriad works of John Hughes made scads of money on modest budgets. But as with any formula-driven movie craze, people grew tired of seeing lazy variations on the same stock narratives, and, by the end of the decade, had fallen out of mainstream favor.

The target audience for these movies was tired of being pandered to, but the studios didn't know how to place an original spin on the subgenre. It turned out they just lacked the guts to address the angst of Generation X in a frank, darkly comedic way. No studio in Hollywood would touch Daniel Waters' screenplay for "Heathers," but director Michael Lehmann and producer Denise Di Novi knew that it was simply too radical and funny to go unfilmed. It was clearly a risk to make a savage high school satire that mined the topic of teen suicide for caustic laughs, but kids of this era had been so inundated with PSAs and Afterschool Specials that they could no longer take the dour sermonizing of adults seriously. They needed to laugh at the bleakness.

"Heathers" was a gloriously freeing movie for Gen X-ers. It was a movie that both reflected and made fun of our snarky worldview. It made icons out of Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, and gave us dozens of quotable lines — some of which proved too salty for the actors tasked with speaking them. For instance, Shannen Doherty passed on the opportunity to utter the unforgettable exclamation, "F*** me gently with a chainsaw." You might be surprised that the bad girl of "Beverly Hills 90210" would balk at this, but when Doherty made "Heathers," she was still a wholesome young actor.

In Entertainment Weekly's 2014 oral history about the making of "Heathers," Ryder revealed that Doherty was gun-shy about some of Waters' profane dialogue. "Shannen had problems with the swearing," said Ryder. "There's a moment when we're in the hallway and she's just shown me the petition, and then she walks away, and you can notice that I put my hand through my hai,r but I stop and look at her. She was supposed to say, "F*** me gently with a chainsaw." But she refused to say it."

Doherty confirmed this, telling EW, "It was definitely the first time I had ever, ever spoken like that in my entire life. I was a very sheltered 17-year-old. My mom was on set with me. I definitely had moments where I was blushing through my makeup." Ryder was sympathetic to Doherty's discomfort. "In her defense, she had come off of, like, 'Little House on the Prairie'" she said. "That was how she was raised."

The late Doherty's bad industry rep was, according to former collaborators like Kevin Smith, wholly unearned. She was kind to the cast and crew on the set of "Mallrats," which should be a reminder that all celebrity gossip should be viewed with extreme skepticism. But I can't help but wonder if, decades later, Doherty regretted giving that line to Kim Walker's Heather Chandler.