Obviously I kind of won the lottery here." "There was this pause and he went, 'No really, it is.'"įast-forward more than four years to the film's premiere, and Vardaolos told E! on the red carpet, "I got really lucky. "So I went, 'Yeah, all right,'" Vardalos recalled saying in response to his assertion that it was Tom Hanks on the line. That happened so often that when Hanks finally did call, she totally thought it was her friend Brian. The guys, in turn, would pretend to be Hanks whenever they called. When Wilson told her she wanted to make the show into a movie, "I handed Rita my screenplay so fast that her hair flew back," Vardalos told the Tribune.īut Vardalos' friends "thought I was making it up," she told The GBTV Show in 2002, recalling their reaction when she said that Hanks and Wilson might be interested in producing her screenplay. The phone number to reserve a seat was Vardalos' own line, so she knew when the actress was coming-and when Tom Hankswas in the audience a week later, his wife having liked it so much she insisted the Oscar winner go see it, too. "All that mattered to me was that I finally felt heard."įate came calling when Rita Wilson, daughter of a Greek mom, caught the show at the Acme Comedy Theater one night in 1997 after seeing an ad for it in the Los Angeles Times. "When everyone talked about the financial success of the movie, I really didn't know what they were talking about as I didn't understand that part of the industry," she reflected to Huffington Post in 2012. Not that Vardalos threw a wedding just for the gifts. Directed by Joel Zwick, the film cost an estimated $5 million to make and grossed $368.7 million worldwide. Throughout the spring of 2002, moviegoers all over the country were saying "Opa!" to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the tiny rom-com with an A-plus-list producing pedigree that became one of the highest-grossing films of the year and made everyone in attendance at the Portokalos-Miller nuptials feel like part of the family.īased on writer-star Nia Vardalos' own marriage to an American of non-Greek provenance and the humorous aspects of his eventual acceptance into her boisterous, tight-knit Greek-Canadian clan, the culture clash at the heart of the story turned out to be a premise a lot of folks could relate to, no matter their backgrounds.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |