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Billy Crystal's 'Princess Bride' ad-lib was so funny cast and crew had to leave the set

Mandy Patinkin actually bruised a rib from holding back laughter.

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Billy Crystal created most of Miracle Max's lines off the cuff.

Comedic actors know how to deliver lines in just the right way with just the right timing to make an audience laugh. But true comedians are often funnier when they’re allowed to go off-script and let their gift for spontaneous humor shine.

Enter Billy Crystal, whose ad-libbed scene in “The Princess Bride” was so funny it took nearly 30 hours of work to get five minutes of usable footage. Cast members of the cult classic film have shared what happened when director Rob Reiner decided to take the reins off of Crystal, telling him, “Forget the lines, just go for it,” according to actor Cary Elwes. That invitation to improvise would prove to be one of the best—and worst—decisions he could have made for the film.

In the scene, Crystal plays “Miracle Max,” a crotchety old apothecary who argues with his wife (played by Carol Kane) and brings the "mostly dead" Westley back to life with his chocolate-covered magic pill. There were lines written for his character, but he didn't need them. He could—and did—ad-lib for hours, but it proved to be a bit of a problem because the cast and crew just couldn't stop laughing.

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The sound department had to start banishing people off of the set because they were ruining takes with their giggles. Reiner himself, who has a big, boisterous laugh, was one of the first people to go because he couldn't keep it together during the filming. Mandy Patinkin, who played Inigo Montoya and wasn't able to leave, shared that he sustained his only injury in the entire making of the film during the shooting of that scene—a bruised rib from holding in laughter.

Elwes said Reiner told him he needed to lie perfectly still and hold his breath in the scene, but Crystal's "medieval Yiddish stand-up" proved too hilarious and Elwes had to be replaced with his rubber dummy for much of the shoot. Patinkin said that Reiner nearly threw up from laughing so hard, and people in the cast and crew had to bite their hands to keep quiet. Production was nearly shut down for the day and the scene became one of the most expensive scenes in the movie because it used so much film, according to InCinematic. And the vast majority of what was filmed never got seen.

"Unfortunately, there's so many spoiled—brilliantly hilarious takes that we all spoiled," said Elwes. He also wrote in his book about the movie that Crystal never said the same thing or delivered the same line twice. Crystal's improv resulted in some of the most memorable lines from the film, such as the classic, "Sonny, true love is the greatest thing in the world—except for a nice MLT–mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean…"

Even the look of Miracle Max was from Crystal's brain child. He told his makeup artist that he wanted the character to look like a mix between Casey Stengel, former manager for the New York Yankees, and Crystal's grandmother.

Casey StengelCasey Stengel served as inspiration for the Miracle Max character in "The Princess Bride."Public Domain

People loved hearing about Crystal's comedic genius, wishing the footage that couldn't be used would be released.

"You can't plan a movie like The Princess Bride, when you've got the right people sometimes it just happens."

"Nothing greater as an improvising-comedian actor than hearing the words; 'Forget the lines, just go for it.'"

"Three straight days of Billy off the cuff is pure gold. I would've loved to have been on that set lmao."

"When the comedy is so good, you bruise your OWN RIB tryna hold it in."

"Release the tapes, raw and uncut. The people demand it."

We may not have access to the unseen footage of Crystal's improvised hilarity, but we can at least enjoy the scenes that did make it into the film by rewatching "The Princess Bride," which many fans do annually. The film even returned to theaters briefly for its 30th Anniversary in the fall of 2023, much to the delight of people who yearned to see it on the big screen again.

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This article originally appeared in January

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'Wicked' author reveals how one line in 'The Wizard of Oz' inspired Elphaba and Glinda's story

Gregory Maguire says he "fell down to the ground" laughing when the idea hit him.

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Gregory Maguire was inspired by a line in the original 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz."

Have you ever watched a movie or read a book or listened to a piece of music and wondered, "How did they come up with that idea?" The creative process is so enigmatic even artists themselves don't always know where their ideas come from, so It's a treat when we get to hear the genesis of a brilliant idea straight from the horse's mouth. If you've watched "Wicked" and wondered where the idea for the friendship between Elphaba (the Wicked Witch) and Glinda (the Good Witch) came from, the author of the book has shared the precise moment it came to him.

The hit movie "Wicked" is based on the 20-year-old hit stage musical, which is based on the novel "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West" written by Gregory Maguire. While the musical is a simplified version of the 1995 book, the basic storyline—the origins of the two witches from "The Wizard of Oz"—lies at the heart of both. In an interview with BBC, Maguire explained how Elphaba and Glinda's friendship popped into his head.

Maguire was visiting Beatrix Potter's farm in Cumbria, England, and thinking about "The Wizard of Oz," which he had loved as a child and thought could be an interesting basis for a story about evil.

"I thought 'alright, what do we know about 'The Wizard of Oz' from our memories,'" he said. "We have the house falling on the witch. What do we know about that witch? All we know about that witch is that she has feet. So I began to think about Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West…

"There is one scene in the 1939 film where Billie Burke comes down looking all pink and fluffy, and Margaret Hamilton is all crawed and crabbed and she says something like, 'I might have known you'd be behind this, Glinda!' This was my memory, and I thought, now why is she using Glinda's first name? They have known each other. Maybe they've known each other for a long time. Maybe they went to college together. And I fell down onto the ground in the Lake District laughing at the thought that they had gone to college together."

In "Wicked," Glinda and the Wicked Witch, Elphaba, meet as students at Shiz University, a school of wizardry. They get placed as roommates, loathe each other at first, but eventually become best friends. The story grows a lot more complicated from there (and the novel goes darker than the stage play), but it's the character development of the two witches and their relationship with one another that force us to examine our ideas about good and evil.


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Maguire also shared with the Denver Center for Performing Arts what had inspired him to use the "Wizard of Oz" characters in the first place.

"I was living in London in the early 1990’s during the start of the Gulf War. I was interested to see how my own blood temperature chilled at reading a headline in the usually cautious British newspaper, the Times of London: 'Sadaam Hussein: The New Hitler?' I caught myself ready to have a fully formed political opinion about the Gulf War and the necessity of action against Sadaam Hussein on the basis of how that headline made me feel. The use of the word Hitler – what a word! What it evokes! When a few months later several young schoolboys kidnapped and killed a toddler, the British press paid much attention to the nature of the crime. I became interested in the nature of evil, and whether one really could be born bad. I considered briefly writing a novel about Hitler but discarded the notion due to my general discomfort with the reality of those times. But when I realized that nobody had ever written about the second most evil character in our collective American subconscious, the Wicked Witch of the West, I thought I had experienced a small moment of inspiration. Everybody in America knows who the Wicked Witch of the West is, but nobody really knows anything about her. There is more to her than meets the eye."

Authors and artists—and their ideas—help hold a mirror up to humanity for us to see and reflect on who we are, and "Wicked" is one of those stories that makes us take a hard look at what we're seeing in that mirror. Thanks, Gregory Maguire, for launching us on a collective journey that not only entertains but has the potential to change how we see one another.

This story originally appeared last year.

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Emma Thompson explains what made the bedroom scene in “Love Actually” so heart wrenching

It wasn’t just that Alan Rickman had broken her heart.

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Emma Thompson's bedroom scene in "Love Actually" is a performance for the ages.

It's been over 20 years since Alan Rickman broke Emma Thompson's heart by buying that little office tart a necklace in "Love Actually," and some of us still haven't forgiven him. With its overlapping love stories set during Christmastime, the film has become a holiday classic, despite some controversy on whether or not it's actually any good. Some people love it, some people hate it, but no one can deny that Thompson gives an Oscar-worthy performance in one utterly heart-wrecking scene.

Of the eight "Love Actually" relationships, Harry and Karen (Rickman and Thompson, respectively) is the one that gives the film some serious gravitas. While other characters are pining or shooting their shot with varying levels of success, Harry is pulling a mid-life crisis affair with a modelesque coworker while Karen shuffles their children to and fro and keeps Harry's life running smoothly. We see him lie, we see her start to suspect, but the scene where she opens her Christmas present from Harry—a Joni Mitchell CD, not the necklace she had found hidden in his coat and thought was for her—is when we see Thompson's acting strengths in full view. Like, phew.

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What's so striking about the scene, however, is that it's not dramatic in a typical way. There's no external conflict happening—it's just Thompson excusing herself from the family to emotionally process what she's just discovered in secret. We see and feel her heartbreak—it's so visceral—but that's not what makes the scene so powerful. Heartbreak happens all the time in movies. As Thompson explains in an interview with BBC Radio 1, it's the fact that she can't actually react the way she wants to that pulls at people's heartstrings so hard.

"I think it's just because everybody's been through something like it," Thompson says. "What I think really gets to them though is that she has to pull herself together. It's not that she's upset. That's, you know, ten a penny. But it's that she has to pull herself together."

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It's true. The conflict in the scene is between her wanting to break down and her wanting to keep her family's Christmas memories happy and intact. She is a devastated wife, but she's also a devoted mother who doesn't want to devastate her kids. We feel the tension between those two roles and the way she swallows up her grief in order to get her kids to their holiday concert right after finding out her marriage isn't what she thought it was.

"I think it’s to do with the fact that we’re required in our lives to repress the things that we’re feeling," Thompson explained on TODAY. "So, you can be hit right between the eyes with some terrible piece of news, but you can’t react immediately because you’ve got your children there. It’s that thing of not showing — that’s why it hurts. That’s why it moves us."

"If she went, 'Oh my God! I thought you were going to give me a necklace! And now you've given it to somebody else,' we would not be moved, you know?" she continued. "We're moved because she just goes, 'I'm not gonna do it.' And then she makes the bed, the bed that sort of suddenly feels so empty of meaning. And then she goes down and goes, 'Hello, everyone! Let's go.' That's why people identify."

And the way she plays it is perfect. Any actor can cry, but it's her crying while trying not to cry and how she shows us her inner emotional turmoil without her ever saying a single word that's impressive.

If you've never seen "Love Actually" and want to see the Harry and Karen story, here are just their scenes.

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Some people have asked whether Harry actually physically cheated or not, but "Love Actually" script editor Emma Freud clarified that he did. "DEFINITELY had an affair," she wrote on X in 2015. "I begged richard just to make it a flirtation, but no. the whole way."

And did Harry and Karen stay together in the end? The film doesn't really make it clear, but at the screening Freud answered the question: “They stay together but home isn’t as happy as it once was.” Oof. There's just no non-heartbreaking answer to that question.

This is why we watch films, though, isn't it? To see our humanity reflected back to us? To feel what the characters feel? To have our hearts broken vicariously so we can have a good cry without going through the actual pain ourselves?

People usually watch romcoms for the romance and comedy and happy endings, though. So here's to Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman for giving us one of the most poignant scenes in cinema in one of the most unexpected places.

This article originally appeared last year.

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In 2006, the Oscars secretly pressured Heath Ledger to make fun of gay people. He wasn't having it.

Jake Gyllenhaal shared the story of his late Brokeback Mountain co-star's kindness.

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Fájl:Heath Ledger.jpg – Wikipédia

Heath Ledger stayed true to his convictions. He stood up for what he believed in, and it didn't matter if it was in a casual conversation with a friend, on a press junket, or at the Oscars. In a resurfaced video making the rounds, Heath was on the Brokeback Mountain press tour and was asked by an interviewer, "How do you respond to people who suggest this is disgusting?"

Heath seems initially taken aback by the question. He ponders for a moment and then says, "Well, I think it's immature, for one. I think it's an incredible shame that people go out of their way to voice their disgust or negative opinions about the way two people wish to love one another."

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He then expresses how some might be focusing on the wrong things. "At least voice your opinions on how two people share hate and violence and anger towards each other. Isn't that more important? I think so."

Brokeback Mountain is a 2005 film starring Ledger alongside Jake Gyllenhaal, about two sheep herders in Wyoming who find love with one another. It was adapted from a short story by Annie Proulx, originally published in The New Yorker in 1997.

mountain GIFGiphy

In discussing the movie itself (which won three Academy Awards in 2006, including Best Director for Ang Lee, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score), Heath explained, "It's obviously about two men in love. It's gay-themed and easily labeled. The pure fact of it is, it transcends labels. It's the story of two human beings—two souls who are in love."

He truly wanted to make sure that audiences (including the press) understood the entire point of the film. "We're showing that love between two men is just as infectious and emotional and strong and pure as it is with heterosexual love."

While this clip has popped up many times over the years, an interview with Jake Gyllenhaal in 2020 definitively confirmed how important these themes were to Heath. In an interview with Another Man magazine, he discusses how the whole production came together. “There are things you’re chosen for—a quality, an essence—and Ang did that. And it’s still a mystery to me. And something that Heath and I shared: that it was a mystery to us at the time.”

Jake emphasized that Heath put his foot down when some writers of the Oscars telecast wanted to make light of Brokeback Mountain. "I mean, I remember they wanted to do an opening for the Academy Awards that year that was sort of joking about it. And Heath refused. I was sort of at the time, 'Oh, okay... Whatever.' I'm always like, 'It's all in good fun.' And Heath said, 'It's not a joke to me. I don't want to make any jokes about it.'"

According to WION News, Jake reminisced, "That's the thing I loved about Heath. He would never joke. Someone wanted to make a joke about the story or whatever, he was like, 'No. This is about love. Like, that's it, man.'"

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