101 Interesting Behind-The-Scenes Facts About Iconic ’90s TV Shows And Movies
There are so many iconic ’90s TV shows and movies that people love to watch over and over. Over the years, the cast and crew members have shared all kinds of interesting behind-the-scenes tidbits.
Here are 101 behind-the-scenes facts about ’90s movies and TV shows:
1.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had to fight back against studio execs who didn’t want them to star in Good Will Hunting, which they co-wrote. However, they were inspired by Sylvester Stallone, who wrote and starred in Rocky. At the 2016 National Board of Review awards gala, Matt said, “Believe me, they really wanted to take it away from us. They were like, ‘God, Leonardo DiCaprio would be so good in this.’ Every time they said, ‘You can’t do this,’ we said, ‘Actually, it’s been done once before.’ [Sylvester Stallone’s] story changed my life. He had an incredible amount of courage, and he changed the course of our lives.”
2.
James Van Der Beek improvised the Dawson’s Creek “crying face” moment that has since become a huge meme. In 2012, he told HuffPost, “It wasn’t scripted, I don’t think. I mean, it was appropriate for the scene. You know, it was just high drama; you’ve been living with this character for a while, and a scene like that just kind of drops in your lap, and you just lose it. They yell cut and say, ‘Oh my god. That was amazing!’ So I remember being completely surprised by it because it was completely sincere. The fact that it’s being used to mock me now, I think it’s so funny.”
3.
At the 2015 ATX Television Festival’s Dawson’s Creek Writers Room Reunion panel, executive producer Paul Stupin said, “Originally, when Kevin [Williamson] and I started talking, it was pretty clear to both of us it would probably be [Joey] and Dawson. So, the first half of that two-hour [finale], Kevin wrote with the understanding and the awareness that it was going to be, ultimately, those two people who ended up together on our show. But halfway through, Kevin calls me and says, ‘You know what? I changed my mind.'”
Writer Kevin Williamson added, “I will tell you, it was hard. When I said, ‘Yes, I’m gonna do it,’ Dawson was the obvious answer. And then the more I thought about it and the more I was into writing the first hour … I just kept going, I don’t know. This isn’t what the show set up to be. Maybe that’s where it started, but it evolved, and the show has turned into something else.’ I always wanted the show to sort of be surprising and I also wanted it to be honest and young and I also wanted to say something about soul mates. And what I believe soul mates can be… You know, we find our soul mates in our best friends, we find our soul mates in our partners… It’s not always romantic… In some ways, Pacey and Joey are soul mates, I think Dawson and Joey are soul mates, I think Pacey and Dawson are soul mates. It’s a triangle. That’s the show.”
4.
For Mrs. Doubtfire, makeup artist Ve Neill spent four and a half hours on Robin Williams’s makeup transformation. She applied several pieces of a mask, blended them, then painted and molded on wrinkles and blemishes.
5.
To test the believability of his Mrs. Doubtfire disguise, Robin Williams wore the costume to an adult store. He told Sirius XM, “I was dressed as her in San Francisco, and I walked into a sex shop…I tried to buy a double-headed dildo, and I was going, ‘That one right there. The big one. Do you have anything without veins? Something without veins would be lovely’…and I can see this guy behind the counter going, ‘Whoa, this old lady.’ ‘And a scented lube would be nice too. A sandalwood lube, something like that, for a probe.’ And finally, the guy realized it was me and went, ‘Get out of here, Robin, you asshole!'”
6.
This is how Fran Drescher pitched her idea for The Nanny to Peter Marc Jacobson, her husband and collaborator at the time: “It’s kinda a spin on The Sound of Music, only instead of Julie Andrews, I come to the door.”
7.
The Nanny costume designer Brenda Cooper spent eight to ten hours a day shopping for Fran Fine’s iconic wardrobe — even for pieces that only appeared on screen one time. However, she took things a step further, altering and combining garments to create totally unique looks. She told HuffPost, “Every week I had a team of seamstresses in the fittings ― we would be cutting, trimming, pinning. I would be ripping off sleeves, adding sleeves. There was a lot of creative stuff that went on to pump up the volume.”
8.
Queen Latifah stood up for her Living Single costars when the higher-ups bodyshamed them. She told Entertainment Tonight, “I can remember specifically doing Living Single, and the word came down that we needed to lose weight. Here we are, four different women, four different body types, and we needed to lose weight. If anything, it angered me and disheartened me, but it really angered me. I said, ‘We are what women look like. We’re not going to lose weight for whoever’s idea of what we’re supposed to look like.'”
9.
During Titanic‘s final shooting day in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, tens of cast and crew members were unwittingly drugged when they ate chowder spiked with the mind-altering substance PCP. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet weren’t on set that day, but Bill Paxton was among the poisoned. Director James Cameron told Q with Tom Power, “This is a 100 percent true story. You haven’t lived until you’ve been high on PCP, which by the way, I do not recommend to anyone.”
Everyone was rushed to the hospital under the initial concern that they might’ve eaten contaminated shellfish. James continued, “There was an emergency room with no one in it and, like, a nurse, and 85 crew members walk in. We don’t know what’s going on. And basically, somebody had taken a pound of PCP and dumped it into the chowder…We have a pretty strong suspicion who it was, although it was never proven.”
10.
Clueless writer/director Amy Heckerling told Entertainment Weekly, “When I auditioned the kids, I’d always ask them for new words. You know, slang and stuff. That’s where I got ‘going postal.’ I loved calling someone a ‘Monet.’ From far away, they’re fucking gorgeous, and up close, they’re totally different. ‘Betty’ was based on Betty Rubble, who was very pretty. And ‘Barney’ is like, How did he get her? ‘As if’ came from the lesbian community. Any outsider group is going to create their own language — whether it’s homosexual, Black, prisoners, or cabdrivers. You just have to be willing to open your ears and listen.”
Alicia Silverstone added, “I didn’t know what anything meant. I would have to say to Amy, ‘What does ‘As if’ mean? She’s way hipper than I am. I mean, ‘Surfing the crimson wave’?”
11.
Cher’s iconic yellow plaid outfit from Clueless is often imitated, never duplicated — but it almost didn’t happen because of Alicia’s hair! Costume designer Mona May told E! News, “She had to shine. She had to jump out of the page, of the screen. We tried red and we tried blue, which is kind of like a more of a blonde color, and nothing really had the pop, and when I found the yellow suit, the Dolce & Gabbana, and we put it on in the fitting, it was like sunshine, like a ray of sun just entered the room, and that was what Amy [Heckerling] loved, and everybody in the room reacted to it so incredibly because it really — you wouldn’t think of yellow for a blonde girl… But, that really was the perfect thing to embody her in that first scene.”
“It had to be plaid. It’s just quintessential school. You’re taking this very much of a Catholic school uniform and now twisting it to high fashion and then transforming it yet again through the eyes of the high school girl,” she said.
12.
David Duchovny had to fight with some X-Files directors to preserve Mulder’s cool demeanor. He told Entertainment Weekly, “Sometimes I have to fight, because [directors] say, ‘Here’s this dead body. How come Mulder’s not more emotionally involved?’ Everybody’s aghast, and I’m detached, like, ‘Look at those beautiful maggots.’ Like in the episode with the liver-eating squeeze guy who could elongate himself through chimneys, the director wanted me to be mad about this horrible serial killer. I was like, ‘No, this is an amazing discovery! He’s not morally culpable, because he’s genetically driven.’ I judge no one.”
13.
In 2015, Gillian Anderson told the Guardian that there were “definitely periods” where she and her The X-Files costar David Duchovny “hated each other.” She added, “Hate is too strong a word. We didn’t talk for long periods of time. It was intense, and we were both pains in the arse for the other at various times… I’m not going to get into it. I’m not even going to begin to get into that. But we are closer today than we ever have been.”
14.
The X-Files Season 4 episode “Home” stirred so much controversy that it was banned. In this episode, the discovery of the body of a baby with birth defects leads Mulder and Scully to investigate a family who are suspected of incest. After it aired, the negative feedback was so strong that Fox pulled the episode and didn’t broadcast it again for three years. They later paired it with an ad that said, “Only on Halloween would we dare air an episode so controversial it’s been banned from television for three years. Consider yourself warned.” It was the only episode of the series to be given a TV-MA rating.
15.
Writer/director John Singleton cast Morris Chestnut and Cuba Gooding Jr. in Boyz n the Hood because they were the first actors to audition. He told Vice, “It’s funny, because when we were making it, I knew nothing about the process of casting. So the first two people who came in to read for Tre were Morris Chestnut and then Cuba Gooding Jr. And then after those two came in, I said I was going to lunch. We had seven more people to see! But I just said, ‘This guy’s gonna be Tre, and the chocolate guy’s gonna be Ricky. I’m gonna go eat. Goodbye!'”
However, the role of Doughboy was written for Ice Cube. The director continued, “I couldn’t see anyone else playing that part but Ice Cube. I knew him while I was in college and working on The Arsenio Hall Show, where I was a directing intern. He was trying to get backstage to the green room, and they wouldn’t let him back. I said, ‘Hey man, this is Ice Cube from NWA! Come on, man, I’ll take care of you.’ I took him back there, and I told him I had a script I’d been writing for him, and he gave me his phone number. I’d see him around town. He gave me a ride home one night when I was stranded in Hollywood… I said, ‘Remember that script I told you about? I wrote it.’ Seven months after that, we were working on the movie.”
16.
While filming the Friends episode “The One Where Ross Got High,” Matt LeBlanc accidentally ate some of David Schwimmer’s regurgitated trifle (which was really bananas and whipped cream). On The Graham Norton Show, Matt said, “There was too much on his plate. So he starts to eat it all, and he starts laughing, and we cut. We’re cutting, and he spits it back on his plate. I’m sitting right next to him, and I’m looking the other way. I didn’t see him spit it back on his plate. So, I take his plate…and I scrape some on my plate… We go again, and now I’m eating it. We finish the take. No one says anything to me.”
17.
While filming the episode “The One Where No One’s Ready,” Matt LeBlanc dislocated his shoulder. He told Jimmy Kimmel Live, “It was the second scene, and I don’t know if you’ve seen it. Chandler and I are fighting over the big down chair. I’m downstage at the table, and he comes in the door. And we both look at each other, look at the chair, and neither one of us is sitting in it, so we both, like, race to the chair. And I have to just step over the coffee table and land in this big, huge, comfortable chair. I don’t even think it qualifies as a stunt. And somehow, I ended up completely upside down. And I was gonna land on my head between the table and the chair, so I put my arm up to break my fall and just exploded my shoulder.”
He added, “I did a few episodes in a sling. And they wrote it into the show as Joey was jumping on the bed.”
18.
Initially, Courteney Cox auditioned for and got the part of Rachel Green. However, realizing she wasn’t right for the role, she convinced NBC to let her play Monica Gellar instead, and Jennifer Aniston took over as Rachel.
19.
Lisa Kudrow was already playing Ursula on Mad About You when she booked the role of Phoebe Buffay on Friends, so NBC approved executive producer David Crane’s idea to introduce Ursula as Phoebe’s twin sister. Ironically, Lisa’s real-life sister, Helena, served as her body double when they needed to shoot scenes with both Phoebe and Ursula.
20.
On Friends: The Reunion, David Schwimmer revealed that he had a crush on his onscreen love interest, Jennifer Aniston. And then, Jennifer told David, “It was reciprocated.”
She also said, “I just remember saying one time to David, ‘It’s going to be such a bummer if the first time you and I actually kiss is going to be on national television. Sure enough, first time we kissed was in that coffee shop. So, we just channeled all of our love and adoration for each other into Ross and Rachel.”
21.
Phoebe was originally supposed to end up with David, not Mike. When David went to Minsk, actor Hank Azaria “didn’t know that was the end of David.” He told HuffPost, “The plan always was kind of to bring him back. I think, honestly, what happened was Paul Rudd is so awesome that they sort of found a groove with him, and [my character] became more of just the grist for that mill. As opposed to the other way around…It actually did sting a little bit. Whatever part of me is David the science guy who went to Minsk, which admittedly is probably a small part of me, but that part of me wanted to end up with Phoebe. So I was sort of sad when I didn’t…[Paul] certainly has gone on to prove that he was comedically deserving of Phoebe’s love.”
22.
The style aesthetic that Friends wardrobe designer Debra McGuire created was actually the opposite of the baggy clothes that were considered trendy at the time. She told Vogue India, “Oversized unstructured silhouettes were trending back then, but that was too unflattering for television. Also, I did not want the characters to only be in jeans all the time. New York was changing, and I wanted them to reflect that.”
23.
Debra used some of her personal clothes to dress Rachel Green, such as her hot pink faux fur coat and Missoni trousers. Rachel even sported several monochrome outfits from the stylist’s clothing line.
24.
Friends executive producer Marta Kauffman told the costume designer that the characters should be in jeans because they were hanging out in New York, but she disagreed and decided to go for looks that were aspirational instead. She told High Snobiety, “It was all about texture and color and staying true to a New York palette. It was very black, white, gray, with hits of color.”
Debra assigned each of the main characters their own palette. The women were divided into colors, and the men were divided into textures. She told the Guardian, “Monica was black, gray, white, burgundy; Rachel was blues and greens… Ross was tweedy, Chandler had a lot of vintage and racing stripe shirts, Joey had leather jackets, then later sweaters and chenille. Phoebe was in patterns.”
25.
The Matrix production designer Simon Whiteley told CNET, “I like to tell everybody that The Matrix‘s code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes. Without that code, there is no Matrix.” He later told Wired, “The Wachowskis didn’t feel like the design was old-fashioned and traditional enough. They wanted something that was more Japanese, more manga. They asked me if I’d like to have a go working at the code, mainly because my wife is Japanese, and she could help me work out the characters and give me insight into which characters were good and which weren’t.” At home, he went through “stacks of Japanese cookbooks” until he found the perfect one to base his code on.
He continued, “I’ve been kind of not wanting to tell anyone what the recipe book is, partly because that’s the last bit of magic… It’s not actually a book. It’s a magazine, but it’s called a book. It’s something most Japanese people would’ve heard of or have on their bookshelf.”
26.
Per Yahoo, in the original Ghost script, Bruce Joel Rubin wrote Molly as a wood sculptor, not a potter. When director Jerry Zucker expressed concerns that it might seem cliché, Bruce got the idea to make her do pottery when he saw a The Naked Gun sound editor reading a pottery magazine. Demi Moore took a few pottery lessons ahead of filming her famous scene with Patrick Swayze, but he didn’t know anything about pottery until rehearsals. During filming, pro potters started the pots that Demi finished on camera, but things still got messy. The iconic moment when Patrick joins her at the wheel and her pot collapses was totally unplanned. In a DVD featurette, Bruce said, “Nobody expected [the pot] to fall. Demi recovered so quickly… She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t disappointed. In a way, the whole nature of their relationship was shown in that moment.”
27.
Cameron Diaz made her onscreen debut in The Mask after casting director Fern Champion found her through her modeling agent, who worked in the same building as Fern. Director Chuck Russell told Variety, “[Cameron] was the only person for the part, as far as I was concerned, after her first reading. And then I saw the chemistry with her and Jim [Carrey]. Eight callbacks later, including improvs with Jim, I finally convinced producers.”
28.
Discussing the “most difficult celebrity” she’s worked with on Watch What Happens Live in 2016, Busy Philipps said, “James Franco and I really didn’t get along when we were on Freaks and Geeks. We were 19, and we really, really disliked each other. It’s well-documented. He shoved me to the ground once. It was really brutal… We’re friends now and we really like each other now, as adults, but as kids, we did not get along.”
29.
Freaks and Geeks actor Busy Philipps told Vanity Fair, “Paul [Feig] and Judd [Apatow] awkwardly tried to talk to Linda [Cardellini] and me about how, now that we’re on a TV show, we shouldn’t think about losing weight, which had never even occurred to me. They were like, ‘Don’t get crazy now — don’t think you have to be an actress that’s really skinny.’ And I was reading things in the press about how we were the anti-Dawson’s Creek. There was one quote I remember very clearly, like, ‘You won’t find any pretty people on Freaks and Geeks.’ That was interesting as a 19-year-old girl to read. We were not standard packaging.”
Linda added, “They didn’t want us to look like people in other shows — which you don’t really know how to take. It was comforting on one hand, and not so much on the other.”
30.
The Leonardo DiCaprio-led Romeo + Juliet was filmed in Mexico, but the production could’ve been a movie itself. Director Baz Luhrmann told Arts Beat LA, “Look, first let me say I would not swap a day that I spent in Mexico for anything in the world. It was the most adventurous time. Having said that, it is true we were there months longer than we needed to be. We had hurricanes that wiped out the set. We all got sick. Shooting shut down for a week while I had a temperature of 110. The hair and makeup person, Aldo Signoretti, who worked with [director Federico] Fellini, was kidnapped. We paid $US300 to get him back. I thought rather a bargain.”
He continued, “I was not there; he was kidnapped. The bandidos rang up and said, ‘For $US300, you can have him back.’ So Maurizio [Silvi, the makeup artist], who is about this high, goes down clutching the money to outside the hotel, holds it up, chucks them the bag, and they threw him out of the car and broke his leg. So we had adventures. It was an incredible quest. It wasn’t a walk in the park, and the fact that the kids did what they did and put up with what they did was amazing.”
“The reason the film is like it is, is that we embraced everything in the film. For example, Mercutio dies in that storm. Well, that was the hurricane that came and blew our sets away. The wide shots, which you could never get, I asked the guys if the cameras could handle it – we got out and did the wides and caught the storms, then we came back and did the close-ups with wind machines. For a budget of ours, which is between $15–17 million, you can’t achieve that short of massive CGIs,” he said.
31.
In the original Free Willy script, Jesse was quite different. Producer Lauren Shuler-Donner told Entertainment Weekly, “The original script was too sweet, too mushy, too formulaic. The little boy was mute and lived with nuns!”
32.
The chewing tobacco in The Sandlot was “actually shredded beef jerky and black licorice.” Actor Grant Gelt told The Arrow, “They didn’t tell us about the licorice, which, looking back, I think was intended to actually make us feel nauseous. David [Mickey Evans, the director] wanted to capture that immediate sharp reaction of, ‘Holy shit, this is terrible. What were we thinking?’ After a summer of David and the crew having to put up with us, I think that night was a good way for them to get revenge.” Prop master Terry Haskell added, “That was a real tobacco brand, and yep, the black jerky and licorice was me. I absolutely wanted them to feel revolted.”
33.
In The Truman Show, Truman’s iconic catchphrase (and the final line of the movie) — “Good morning! And in case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night” — was the brainchild of Jim Carrey. Writer Andrew Niccol told The Hollywood Reporter, “I think it was originally an ad-lib by Jim, but yes, the duplicitous Christof seized on it and directed the extras in Truman’s life to pretend to be amused… For a while, I think the last line was, ‘You never had a camera in my head.'”
34.
On The Howard Stern Show, Seinfeld actor Jason Alexander revealed that Danny DeVito was offered the role of George Costanza. Theorizing why he turned it down, Jason said, “His career, when we started Seinfeld, would’ve been at its apex. So, he probably didn’t wanna do a sidekick role.”
35.
Jason also said that Chris Rock turned down the role of George. He said, “Why Chris wouldn’t do it, I don’t know. Maybe it didn’t get to an offer stage. I don’t know.”
36.
Heidi Swedberg’s Seinfeld character, Susan, was killed off because the rest of the cast thought she was “impossible” to play off of. On the Howard Stern Show, Jason Alexander said, “Her instincts for doing a scene, where the comedy was, and mine were always misfiring… Julia [Louis-Dreyfus] actually said, ‘Don’t you want to just kill her?’ And Larry [David] went, ‘Ka-bang!'”
However, Jason later apologized for how he told that story, tweeting, “OK, folks, I feel officially awful. The impetus for telling this story was that Howard said, ‘Julia Louis-Dreyfus told me you all wanted to kill her.’ So I told the story to try and clarify that no one wanted to kill Heidi… [She] was generous and gracious, and I am so mad at myself for retelling this story in any way that would diminish her. If I had had more maturity or more security in my own work, I surely would have taken her query and possibly tried to adjust the scenes with her. She surely offered. But, I didn’t have that maturity or security.”
37.
Lawrence Tierney, who played Elaine’s father on one episode, was never brought back because the rest of the cast found him intimidating and scary. In a Season 2 DVD extra, Julia Louis-Dreyfus said, “It’s too bad he was so cuckoo because I’m sure he would’ve been back otherwise.” Jason Alexander said, “There was every reason in the world to have that be an ongoing character because there was just so much tension between him and every other character. It was brilliant.”
However, the cast went on to describe an incident where Lawrence allegedly stole one of Jerry’s knives from the set and hid it in his jacket. After Jerry Seinfeld called him out on it, Lawrence tried to make a joke, then pulled the knife out, made the Psycho sound, and advanced on Jerry a bit. Jason added, “Lawrence Tierney, I think, scared the living crap out of all of us.”
38.
The lead character in Sister Act was originally named Terri, but screenwriter Paul Rudnick told the New Yorker, “Whoopi Goldberg was suddenly eager to play the part of Terri, although she asked that the character’s name be changed to Deloris, because, I was told, she’d always wanted to play someone named Deloris.”
39.
According to Screen Rant, during the height of his professional rivalry with Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger read the terrible script for Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, then he spread a rumor about having “tremendous interest” in it, which he knew would prompt Sylvester to accept the lead role. Sylvester described the movie as “one of the worst films in the entire solar system, including alien productions we’ve never seen.” It earned him his fourth Razzie for Worst Actor.
40.
Per Metro, in the Home Alone scene where Marv walks barefoot through the snow, Daniel Stern wore fake feet because of the cold. He told ComicBook.com, “I do get asked a lot, ‘Was that a real tarantula on your face? What’s Joe Pesci like? Did it hurt when you got hit in the face with the iron?’’ That one, I guess getting hit in the face, ‘Did it hurt when you got hit in the face with the bricks?’ I think maybe that one. When people started asking me that, I went, ‘You know it’s fake, right? There’s a prop department. I didn’t get hit in the face with bricks.’ They’re like, ‘Oh.’ The believability of it is wonderful, but it did concern me to a point when that movie first came out actually, that I started teaching a course in media literacy.”
41.
After living large off the success of “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” Will Smith ended up broke when his next album flopped. He also didn’t pay his taxes, so the IRS took a lot of his expensive cars and such. However, his then-girlfriend encouraged him to network at The Arsenio Hall Show, where he met Benny Medina, who pitched him the idea for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
42.
At a house party, Quincy Jones had Will do an impromptu audition for the top NBC execs, which impressed the onlookers so much that the contract for him to star on the show was drawn up that night. In a YouTube video, Will said, “We took a picture, and we signed the basic deal for Fresh Prince, and three months later, we were shooting the pilot, and that’s the story of how I became the Prince of Bel-Air.”
43.
In his memoir Will, Will Smith revealed that he asked out Karyn Parsons, who played his cousin on Fresh Prince. However, she rejected him. He wrote, “[Karyn] was smart enough to tell me ‘hell no’ when I tried to explain that we were not really cousins, so it would be fine if we dated. Telling her, ‘I swear it won’t mess up our working relationship.’ She knew better than that — good call, K.P.”
44.
Every time Jazz was thrown out of the Banks’ house, they used the exact same footage. In his memoir, Will Smith wrote, “The interior of the Bel-Air mansion and the exterior are two different locations, and we only had a one-day shoot at the exterior location. So, we had to use the same shot of [DJ Jazzy] Jeff being thrown out over and over. Therefore, any time you see Jeff enter with the brown-and-white Aztec patterned shirt, you know that he’ll be thrown out in that scene.”
45.
In Pretty Woman, the scene where Edward closes the jewelry box on Vivian’s hand was actually an unscripted prank on Julia Roberts! Director Gary Marshall told DGA Quarterly Magazine, “This was not actually a scene written into the movie — rather a prank I played on Julia with Richard’s help. Why, you may ask, would I fool around when ‘time is money?’ The reason is simple: while making a film there are, believe it or not, ‘rotten days,’ ‘cranky days,’ and ‘stupid, absurd days.’ Days when the actors are sluggish from late-night parties and premieres, or from shooting too many days in a row. And sometimes the crew is tired from too hot, too cold, too rainy or too many long days. I find the solution to this problem is to do pranks and jokes.”
He continued, “Other directors use yelling or pep talks or firing people to shake up a shoot. My sister Penny sometimes uses begging, á la, ‘Please, please everybody, act better. I have a stomachache and a headache, and I wanna wrap and go home.’ Kidding around works best for me. For instance, during Julia’s bubble bath scene in Pretty Woman when she went under the soapy water for a few moments, Richard Gere, myself, and the entire crew disappeared and were gone when she came up. It was just her in a tub on a ghost ship. And I also started a rumor during that scene that I had put goldfish in the bathtub, and everybody, including Julia, was looking for the fish.”
46.
Franck, the eccentric wedding planner in Father of the Bride, was reportedly inspired by Kevin Lee, a celebrity wedding and event planner who’s worked with clients such as Kim Kardashian, Nic Cage, and Jennifer Aniston. He told The Daily Dish that a producer informed him of the inspiration. He said, “Oh yeah, absolutely it was me! I said, ‘Wow.’ I was totally shocked when he told me that…[Martin Short] captured my character so well, and I was overwhelmed. Officially, I am the Franck.”
47.
The Pasadena house that was used for the exterior shots in Father of the Bride became a real-life wedding venue when the owners, Sarah Bradley and Darrell Spence, used it to host their wedding reception. They purchased the home in 1999 and tied the knot a little under a year later. Sarah told HGTV, “When I gave [the event planner] our address, she said, ‘Oh, you’re near the Father of the Bride house.’ I said, ‘No, we are the Father of the Bride house.'” She said the excited planner shouted, “I’m going to be Franck!”
Additionally, fans love to visit the house — and some even propose there. Once, on the way home from a walk with their two kids, the couple decided to hang back as a proposal unfolded. Sarah said, “I saw the guy on one knee and told Darrell, ‘We can’t go over there with a screaming child.’ They’ll be like, ‘Forget it!'”
48.
Friends costars Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow unintentionally wore the same red Moschino jacket in two of their most iconic ’90s movie roles. Courteney wore it during the climax of Scream, and Lisa wore it during Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion. Scream costume designer Cynthia Bergstrom told Nylon, “It was funny because Mona and I were at the same time at [Neiman Marcus] in Beverly Hills, and we looked at that Moschino, and we both went for it. She put the jacket with a different skirt, and I bought it as a suit and kept it together. But it was really funny when we were shopping. I’d look over and see what she had in her arms, and she’d look and see what I had. It was so much fun.”
49.
In Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, the triangular symbol on Romy’s blue dress is a hidden Star Trek reference. Costume designer Mona May told Nylon she wanted a “slick” and “futuristic” look, so she added the Star Fleet insignia-esque symbol. She said, “I didn’t want to make it too plain or put stars all over it or anything weird, so it was just enough.”
50.
When Felicity Porter infamously cut her hair short in Felicity Season 2, the stylist started Keri Russell’s haircut for real. The actor later went to a real salon to have it finished. At the 2018 ATX TV Festival, Keri said, “The way it all totally went down was they were wrapping up the first season…and the hair people were putting away everything they had into boxes, and there was a little boy’s wig. We put it on me at like 2 in the morning as a joke…and we took a Polaroid, and over the summer, we thought it’d be really funny to send to J.J. [Abrams] and Matt [Reeves] and say, ‘I cut my hair — hope you like it.’ Totally as a joke…”
She continued, “I was with my girlfriends at some lake, and I got this phone call…and [J.J.] said, ‘Hey, we got your picture.’ No laughing. No nothing. ‘Would you really cut your hair?’ And I was like, ‘I guess?’ … We shot that scene at like 4 a.m. on a Friday. And the hair girl actually…it’s in slow motion, like her cutting my hair, sniping it. And then a few hours later, I went to a hair salon, and someone cut the rest of it off.”
51.
Interview with the Vampire author Anne Rice was initially so opposed to Tom Cruise’s casting as Lestat de Lioncourt that she attended a protest against him at a bookstore. She told Esquire, “I didn’t speak out in any organized or planned way. These people have stood in line for me three and four hours. They are my readers, and they hate this. I was carried along by my readers. I didn’t start the whole thing at all.”
However, after the film came out, she praised him in an open letter, writing, “From the moment he appeared, Tom was Lestat for me. He has the immense physical and moral presence; he was defiant and yet never without conscience; he was beautiful beyond description yet compelled to do cruel things. The sheer beauty of Tom was dazzling, but the polish of his acting, his flawless plunge into the Lestat persona, his ability to speak rather boldly poetic lines, and speak them with seeming ease and conviction were exhilarating and uplifting. The guy is great. I’m no good at modesty. I like to believe Tom’s Lestat will be remembered the way Olivier’s Hamlet is remembered. Others may play the role some day but no one will ever forget Tom’s version of it.”
52.
Dolly Parton coproduced Buffy the Vampire Slayer through Sandollar Productions, the production company she cofounded — and she was actually “very involved” with the series! She told Business Insider, “A lot of my work was done just conversing back and forth with the business people there. And I’d go out for meetings now and then.”
Because she lived in Nashville, she wasn’t on set very often and didn’t meet the cast, but she sent them gifts. She said, “I didn’t get to meet all of the people, but I wanted them to know that I was there for them, I was proud of them, and they were doing a great job… I was very excited about the show. That little show did great.”
53.
Ryan Reynolds was reportedly offered the role of Xander Harris on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but he declined. He told the Star, “I love that show, and I loved Joss Whedon, the creator of the show, but my biggest concern was that I didn’t want to play a guy in high school. I had just come out of high school, and it was fucking awful.”
54.
The role of Xander ultimately went to Nicholas Brendon. When the character was split into two people in Season 3, Nicholas’s twin brother, Kelly Donovan, guest-starred as his other half. Nicholas did most of the acting and speaking for both roles, but Kelly acted as a body double. He also had a few lines when both halves of Xander needed to speak directly to each other.
55.
Spike wasn’t meant to be Buffy’s love interest, and James Marsters’s popularity with the audience allegedly angered series creator Joss Whedeon so much that he pushed the actor into a wall. James told the podcast Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum, “In Joss’s world, evil is not cool, and I really respect him for that. Vampire were just a metaphor for the challenges that you get over in your adolescence. So vampires are supposed to be overcome, and he got talked into one sexy vampire that’s not gonna be killed off. That was Angel. And I was supposed to come in and get killed off. And the audience immediately reacted to me in a way that was gonna make it very difficult to kill me off. And the network was telling him, ‘Oh my God, keep this guy in the show’ and all of that. I was basically ruining his show.”
He continued, “But the thing is that that [decision] is gonna change the show from being about a teenager overcoming adolescence into a show where those problems are kinda sexy, aren’t they? All this psychotic…I was killing people all the time! I was shredding them! And the audience was going, ‘Oh, we want more of that,’ and Joss is like, ‘No, no, the point is that you overcome the evil! That’s the point.’ So, if I was in his shoes, I would’ve killed me off. I wouldn’t have pushed me against the wall. I just would’ve killed him off immediately, saying, ‘I know I told you five episodes. We’ll pay you for five, but you’re dead after two, sorry.'”
“He just got frustrated and figured it out, but there was that day when he pushed me up against the wall. I don’t remember how it started. I just have this image of him, and he’s in my face. He goes, ‘I don’t care how popular you are, kid. You are dead. You are dead. You are dead. You got me?’ …I just said, ‘It’s your football, dude. You gotta do what you wanna do,'” James said.
56.
Playing Spike did serious damage to James’s hair. The label on the bottle of bleach he used to get Spike’s signature platinum shade warned that it should only be used every six weeks, but he “did it every eight days, because a vampire is dead, so your hair doesn’t grow, so you can’t have roots.” In 2016, he told the Minnesota Star Tribune, “They told me repeatedly my hair would fall out or rather they were not sure I would have hair by the end… The makeup department was really particular: There can never be roots in your hair. So for seven years, we did it every episode. I agreed to bleaching when I thought I was going to die in five episodes. I don’t know if I would have agreed to it for seven years.”
57.
Reese Witherspoon helped rewrite parts of the Cruel Intentions script. Her costar (and boyfriend at the time of filming) Ryan Philippe told Entertainment Weekly, “She loved the movie for me, but it wasn’t a great part at the time for her. She helped Roger [Kumble, the writer/director] turn it into one.” Roger said, “It’s true, she came and sat with me for a week, and we worked on the dialogue together. Annette was the character most removed from me. There’s no way the movie would have its success if it weren’t for [Reese’s] talent as a writer.”
Reese added, “I remember finding Annette too demure and too much of a woman influenced by a guy’s manipulations. I was starting what I guess became my bigger mission in life — of questioning why women were written certain ways on film.”
58.
In the Forrest Gump scene where the protagonist gives a speech at an anti-Vietnam protest, you can’t hear what Tom Hanks is saying. Screenwriter Eric Roth told Yahoo Entertainment, “[Director Robert Zemeckis] never liked the speech I had Forrest Gump give when he was given the microphone at that event. He said, ‘We need something that’s way funnier and way more important.’ Funnier I tried, and I even enlisted some comedians. I asked Billy Crystal to help me, I asked Robin [Williams], [some] other people. And nothing ever resonated. And then I tried to write some big glorious speech about patriotism and Vietnam. It was a really wonderful American speech. And that didn’t quite work. So Bob came up with the solution of he starts speaking, and they pull the plug.”
59.
Carrie Fisher and George Lucas had secret cameos in Hook! According to The Wrap, filmmakers confirmed they appeared as a couple on the bridge that Tinker Bell enchants.
60.
According to Digital Spy, She’s All That was filmed in the same high school as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Torrance High School, which is in California). There’s another connection between the two — Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar made a cameo in She’s All That! And of course, she went on to marry the lead of the movie, Freddie Prinze Jr.
61.
Topanga Lawrence was only supposed to be on one episode of Boy Meets World, but Danielle Fishel “came in and killed it, and then it changed the whole show.” At ’90s Con 2022, Danielle said, “Yeah, it was only supposed to be, I think, one episode — possibly a recurring — and then she basically became the rest of the show.”
62.
When Topanga spontaneously hacked off her hair in Season 4, Danielle was “thrilled” to cut it herself. On a 2024 episode of Pod Meets World, she said, “I had wanted to do it all summer. The reason we did the episode is because I had called [series creator Michael Jacobs] the beginning of summer and said, ‘I wanna cut my hair. Can I cut it?’ And he said, ‘At least let me write an episode for it.’ So, I had to wait all summer. So, by the time we got to it, I had been ready to cut my hair for months.”
During filming, she faked the cut several times to practice, with director Jeff McCracken shouting, “Stop!” Danielle continued, “I remember Michael coming out and going, ‘Show me where you’re gonna cut. Show me. Show me where.’ … Because he did not want it to be too short. And he knew I had control because I was gonna be the one with the scissors. So, he wanted to know. I wanted it a little shorter. I knew he wanted it a little longer. And so, yes, it was a very intense day.”
63.
On their joint podcast Pod Meets World, Danielle told her Boy Meets World costar Rider Strong that she’d had a crush on him. She said, “I think it started maybe later in Season 1 and definitely through Season 2.”
64.
In Season 6, Mr. Feeny married Dean Bolander, who was played by William Daniels’s real-life wife, Bonnie Bartlett Daniels. They worked together frequently throughout their careers. In 2019, Bonnie told Today, “We worked for so long on St. Elsewhere because we played man and wife on that, and won Emmys and all kinds of stuff … And we had worked together when we were kids. We’ve been together for 68 years, so we’ve worked a lot together.”
65.
In Thelma & Louise, Geena Davis’s real-life ex-boyfriend, Chris McDonald, played her onscreen husband on her recommendation. According to WLIW, she told director Ridley Scott that Chris was “the funniest guy in the world.” His humor was on full display during his audition, and it carried into production. While filming a scene where he walks to the car, Chris accidentally tripped, but his comedic timing was so perfect that the shot stayed in the final cut.
66.
In Addams Family Values, Fester is significantly shorter than Gomez, but in real life, actor Christopher Lloyd is only an inch shorter than Raúl Juliá. Christopher told BuzzFeed, “I always had my knees bent to make me look shorter and more squat. It worked out well because it gave me kind of a funny walk.”
67.
Macaulay Culkin’s role in My Girl was originally smaller. Director Howard Zieff told Entertainment Weekly, “Mack and Anna [Chlumsky] were just two kids working together on a movie. Mack didn’t have the attitude ‘I’m a star and you’re not.’’ We added two or three more scenes with him because as he began to work with her, there was terrific synergy.”
68.
Robin Williams improvised many of his lines as the Genie in Aladdin. In a Reddit AMA, he said, “Initially I was just doing the scripted lines and I asked ‘Do you mind if I try something?’ and then 18 hours of recording later, they had the genie. I just started playing, and they said ‘just go with it, go with it, go with it.’ So I improvised the character. I think that in the end, there were something like 40 different voices that I did for that role.”
69.
According to Screen Rant, CGI was only used for six minutes of Jurassic Park. Most of the dinosaurs were created using practical effects, such as puppets and animatronics. For example, the sick triceratops that Ellie Sattler interacts closely with is a gigantic puppet with hand-sculpted skin and control rods beneath its flanks.
70.
Per Yahoo, the effects in Death Becomes Her were a groundbreaking mix of computer graphics and practical effects. Here’s an example: for Meryl Streep’s head spin scene, she filmed the scene facing backwards on set. Later, at the Industrial Light and Magic studio, she wore a blue bodysuit and sat in a chair while performing with only her head. The two shots were combined in post-production.
Visual effects art director Doug Chiang told Yahoo, “A lot of those things involved shooting elements after the fact, and choreographing it very carefully so that her expressions matched her body poses. And it was a very delicate thing. In hindsight, it’s very, very complex, whereas today we would probably do most of that visually. But back then, it was still old-school, because we were blending traditional techniques with the new tools that we had in computer graphics.”
71.
HBO first offered the role of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City to Dana Delany, but she turned it down for fear of being pigeonholed because she “had done a movie called Live Nude Girls with Kim Cattrall that was somewhat similar.” She told the LA Times, “It was very much in the early stages, and I had just done Nude Girls and Exit to Eden, and I just said to Darren [Starr], ‘I cannot do a show with ‘sex’ in the title.'”
Then the studio had a contract with Lisa Edelstein. She told Access Hollywood, “I was either going to do it or not. It all depended on whether [Sarah Jessica Parker] said yes. My contract was complete. I was waiting.” After losing out on the role, she “didn’t really watch” the series because it was “too painful.”
72.
The iconic red Baywatch swimsuits were designed not by a wardrobe designer but by a competition swimwear company. Series co-creator Gregory J. Bonann told Yahoo Sports, “TYR designed the suit per my specs. [It] had to look good on the women, but had to also be functional in the water. The now-famous ‘slo-mo’ shooting … required good support on the top and minimal creep in the back. … All lifeguards, not almost all, but all lifeguards, come from a competitive swimming background. That means that all of these women grew up in one-piece swimsuits, not bikinis.”
He continued, “The obvious goal was to replicate, as closely as possible, what the actual lifeguard women wear. When in the water, in big surf, with multiple victims grabbing onto your hair, suit, arms, legs, etc., they could — and do — easily rip off your swimsuit if they are desperate enough. A two-piece for women would be just too risky to wear in the water with a victim grabbing, scratching, kicking, and screaming.”
73.
Richard E. Grant didn’t want to be in the Spice Girls movie, Spice World, but his daughter made him. He told Vulture, “When my daughter was 9, I got offered the part in Spice World, and she said I had to do it. ‘But my acting credibility…’ And she’d say, ‘No, no, you have to. You have to because I want to meet them.’ So I did, and she was so thrilled. I had school playground credibility for about two semesters, and then, of course, you dip into the other side when they go, ‘No, I was never a Spice Girls fan!’ Now that generation has all come back around again going, ‘Yeah, we love the Spice Girls!'”
He continued, “In essence, a similar thing happened when I got called to be in one episode of Girls. My daughter literally levitated. She’s a creative writing degree student, and she said, ‘You have no idea what it would mean if I could meet or be in the same room or breathe the same air as Lena Dunham.’ I feel as a father if I’ve done anything right at all, I’ve done both the Spice Girls movie and Girls.”
74.
Wilson Cruz’s My So-Called Life character, Rickie Vasquez, was important to him as a young gay man. In 2019, he told Variety, ” I went in [to the audition] kind of dressed like Rickie. I put on these bright red Levi’s and a rainbow shirt. I sprayed my hair to the hilt. I put on eyeliner. When I got there, there were three or four guys going for the same part, but they were wearing khakis and a polo. I thought, ‘Boy, did you guys miss the mark on this one.’ So when I walked in and met with [casting director] Mary Goldberg, it felt really personal to me.”
“We went through the scene. There wasn’t a lot in the pilot, because I didn’t say a lot. Mary looked at me like, ‘Thank you.’ I started to well up. I walked to the door to leave, not knowing if I was going to come back or not. I turned around and said to her, ‘Before I go, please do me a favor and tell Winnie Holzman, this would have meant so much to me when I was 16 years old to see this guy on TV,'” he said.
And landing the role of Rickie is what spurred Wilson to come out. He told Variety, “My agent sent me the script, and she didn’t necessarily know that I was gay. I read it, and I had to decide whether or not I wanted to disclose to her. I waited. I had made a deal with myself that I would come out if the series went. I wanted people to know that I, as a gay man — a gay boy at the time — really put my stamp of approval to what we were doing. So that’s when I told my parents, and that’s when I was kicked out… I lived on friends’ couches and in my car until we started filming the series. I remember we were with Winnie on our way to something, and I told her what had happened with my dad. Months later, I get this script where Rickie goes through a very similar thing. When I look back on that whole experience, I think of my fictional world and my reality converging. It was cathartic.”
75.
You’ve Got Mail faced a common problem we’ve all likely encountered on social media — the username they wanted was already taken. For legal reasons, they had to ask the real woman behind the screen name Shopgirl to let them have it. Writer/director Nora Ephron told E! News, “She actually worked at an autobody shop.”
76.
A League of Their Own producer Robert Greenhut told ESPN, “The casting took forever. We were trying to get actresses who actually played baseball, so that narrowed down the field right away. In some cases, it wasn’t that crucial because maybe their scenes didn’t require that much playing. But for others, they really had to display some sort of athletic prowess. So we all quickly learned how hard it is to throw from first base to third to get somebody out. It looks so easy when you see it on television.”
However, Madonna didn’t have any baseball experience prior to landing the role of Mae Mordabito. According to Sports Illustrated, she spent a summer in Chicago learning the sport.
77.
Initially, Steve Urkel was supposed to be a one-off character on Family Matters. Series creator Michael Warren even named him after a real-life friend as a joke. However, Urkel increased ratings, so production mandated that he appear in every episode. He helped make the show a massive hit. Michael told the LA Times, “I think the only person who is not a fan of Family Matters is my friend Steve Urkel. It has terribly affected his life.”
78.
Groundhog Day is famously set in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but it was actually filmed in Woodstock, Illinois. Director Harold Ramis told Collider, “We didn’t use Punxsutawney for the film because Punxsutawney itself didn’t have a real town center that looked very good on camera, so we wanted a town that looked perfect, so the town you’ll see is Woodstock, IL. We scouted all of southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois looking for the perfect town, and we pulled into Woodstock just the way the van pulls into town in the movie. It was the last town we saw, and we looked at this little town square and thought, ‘Aw, this is perfect.'” He also said that the people of Punxsutawney “were very jealous that the movie wasn’t shot in Punxsutawney, but when they saw Woodstock, they thought it looked better than their town.”
79.
According to Screen Rant, one of the two animatronic cats used for Thackery Binx in Hocus Pocus was reused as Salem Saberhagen in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Nick Bakay, who voiced Salem, told Vanity Fair, “ABC did not love the animatronic cat. And I get it: it’s not like it was going to fool anyone. But I think that it was part of the charm of the show—quaint, old-school, practical magic and weird cat puppets. And for some reason, it kind of worked.”
80.
Sabrina the Teenage Witch never would’ve made it off the ground without Melissa Joan Hart’s mom, Paula Hart. In 2016, Melissa told Marie Claire, “I produced the movie with my mom first and then we spun it off for the series, so I was the boss and the star, which was a nice place to be. Not just an actor for hire but a voice in the production as well. My mom doesn’t get nearly enough credit for her job as the woman spearheading the show. She is the one who was handed the Archie Comic book on a playground at my sister’s school in Manhattan and sold it to Viacom as a Showtime movie. She always knew it would make an incredible series, but no one would listen until she cut together a trailer from the movie and pitched it to all four major networks at the time.”
“She got three offers in the room for the series, and we decided ABC was the right home because we were fans of the TGIF lineup and felt it was the right place for our show. But even once the show was on the air, the network didn’t really support it the first season. They were counting on Clueless the show to be the big hit; we were just the little show that would follow that. But we ended up being the fan favorite and held our spot on that network (even forcing Everybody Loves Raymond to move to a different night of the week) for four years until we moved to WB for the final three seasons,” she said.
81.
Lindsay Lohan and Simon Kunz choreographed their iconic The Parent Trap handshake themselves. He told Bustle, “The first time [Lindsay and I] met up, we worked on the handshake idea, about what it could be. I think I’d done something in the audition, just mucking about without Lindsay there, just doing silly moves. They liked a few of those, and so we basically spent an afternoon, two or three hours really, just working out that routine…If you ask me right now [to do it], I’d know one or two bits there, but I tell you what, it would only take me 20 minutes, and then I’d have it absolutely down pat.”
82.
Speed director Jan de Bont told HuffPost that his “biggest aim was making it all look real” — which led to Sandra Bullock actually driving the bus through the street! There was stunt driver in the back, but she wasn’t on a studio lot or in front of a green screen. According to USA Today, she got a Santa Monica bus driver’s license for the role. She said, “I was at the wheel of projectile. So I was just happy to be alive. I was new to the whole game, so I wasn’t aware of what was happening or what felt right. We were just in it. It was real. When we were smashing into things (on screen), we were really smashing into those things.”
83.
Space Jam was initially the brainchild of David Falk, Michael Jordan’s agent, who’d initially kept the NBA legend away from the silver screen. He told the New York Times, “We got piles of scripts. But they didn’t fit Michael Jordan. He can’t really act. And you have to know your limitations.”
84.
To play Imhotep in The Mummy, Arnold Vosloo had to be completely hairless. He told the Irish Independent, “For the first movie, I bravely consented for this lovely Scottish girl, who is my make-up artist, to wax me. That happened one time. I yelled like a stuffed pig. It’s beyond belief what you women go through. It’s unreal.”
85.
At the Television Critics Association’s 2015 press tour, John Stamos admitted that rumors he tried to get Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen fired from Full House were true — and he temporarily succeeded! He said, “It’s sort of true that the Olsen twins cried a lot. It was very difficult to get the shot. So I [said], ‘Get them out…!’ That is actually 100 percent accurate. They brought in a couple of unattractive redheaded kids. We tried that for a while, and that didn’t work. [Producers] were like, all right, get the Olsen twins back. And that’s the story.”
86.
According to Collider, Lori Loughlin was only supposed to play Rebecca Donaldson for six episodes. However, her chemistry with John Stamos — along with the rest of the cast — and her popularity spurred producers to make her a permanent fixture. Becky famously joined the Tanner household, marrying Uncle Jesse in Season 4.
87.
Many viewers wanted them to be together in real life, and John told HuffPost Live that they “actually did date” years before the show. He said, “We went on a date to Disneyland before we were both married. In real life, when we were 18, 19 years old. No disrespect to her family and her husband now, I would say that she could be the one that got away. She’s one of my dearest friends, and that’s good enough. I really do adore her.”
88.
Mike Meyers told Newsweek that the Austin Powers cast was allowed to “do their own thing.” He said, “About 30 to 40 percent is improv.”
89.
Christopher McDonald “nearly didn’t do” Happy Gilmore — and he actually turned down the role of Shooter McGavin twice. He told And So It Begins, “I was tired. I wanted to see more of my family. But then I played a round of golf in Seattle, and we won. And that high was something else. So, with my golf shoes still on, I went in the locker room, called my agent, and said, ‘Is that golf movie still available? Because I just won this tournament and I’m feeling a little bit, well, Shooterish.’ So I met Adam [Sandler], because I didn’t know if the guy who did Opera Man was going to be any good. I laughed the entire time I spoke with him, and I knew that this kid was really smart.”
90.
Saved by the Bell costars Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Elizabeth Berkley dated at some point during filming, which he confirmed in 2019. He told Entertainment Tonight, “We dated. If you want to call it dating, sure. You’re in an environment, you know how it is when you’re working on a set, and we were young, I mean, we were young. There’s no one around, really. I mean, you work and live in a bubble. You’re in LA, right? You’re in your cars, and you come to set, and you do your work, and you’re with these beautiful women, and then you go back in your car. You’re not going to school, so you don’t have a lot of choices. People say, ‘Well, didn’t you go out?’ Not really.”
91.
Mark-Paul also dated Lark Voorhies for three years. He told People, “All of us dated at one point or another—it was incestuous! Sometimes the girls would gang up on the guys. Tiffani and Elizabeth would hate me, and then they’d hate Lark because Lark was talking to me, and Mario was supposed to side with someone. All that stuff you did in high school, like, ‘How could you talk to him?'”
92.
And Mark-Paul reportedly had a mutual crush on Tiffani Thiessen! Costar Ed Alonzo told Entertainment Tonight, “They kinda liked each other a bit. They liked each other a lot. It was very cute. It was hand-holding and looking over.”
93.
Tiffani Thiessen dated Mario Lopez during their time at Bayside High. In his memoir Just Between Us, he reportedly wrote, “I thought that being loyal to Tiffani was the right thing to do. But I can’t say that I was capable at that age of following through on my noble intentions.”
94.
Never Been Kissed actor Drew Barrymore told the podcast Hey Dude…The ’90s Called!, “I would get these calls from the studio, and they were like, ‘I’m sorry, but you’re just looking too unattractive.’ …I was forced to even tone it down a little bit because I had gone even farther, and then they said something that appealed to my sensibilities rather than my ego. They were like, ‘We don’t want you to lose the heart because you’re going so far for the comedy,’ and I was like, ‘Great argument. Let me dial it back a little bit.’ So Josie, what you see there, is me dialed back.”
95.
In the Everybody Loves Raymond pilot, Raymond’s twin sons were named Gregory and Matthew after his real-life twin boys. However, the characters’ names were changed to Geoffrey and Michael. They were played by Sawyer and Sullivan Sweeten.
96.
Sawyer and Sullivan’s big sister, Madylin, played their onscreen sister Ally. Her character is named after Ray Romano’s daughter.
97.
In 2014, Jennie Garth confirmed longstanding rumors of an on-set feud with her Beverly Hills, 90210 costar Shannen Doherty to E! News. She said, “We were locked in this sound stage for 14-16 hours every day. There were times when we loved each other, and there were times when we wanted to claw each other’s eyes out.” In her book Deep Thoughts From a Hollywood Blonde, Jennie added, “It was more of just young girls finding their way and finding their individual voices. Shannen and I are both Aries women, we’re both very strong, independent women, so we butt heads a lot. Now, as grown women, we happen to get along as well.”
Then, on Celebrity Lie Detector in 2015, Tori Spelling admitted that tensions between Shannen Doherty and the rest of the cast were high. Describing the incident that was the last straw, Tori said, “Shannen runs in and sits down to get [her] hair done, and you could just feel everyone was turning and looking. I knew someone was gonna say something.” Shannen got into a “heated fight” with Ian Ziering, who allegedly told her, “You are a C-U-N-T: Can’t Understand Normal Thinking.” Afterwards, the cast banded together to get Shannen fired, so Tori brought the issue to her dad, series creator Aaron Spelling.
Tori said, “I felt like I was a part of something, a movement, that cost someone their livelihood… Was she a horrible person? No. She was one of the best friends I ever had.” However, she felt she made the right decision “in the workplace, as a coworker.”
98.
Shannen Doherty was allegedly fired from Charmed because of an ultimatum Alyssa Milano gave producers. On Shannen’s podcast Let’s Be Clear, costar Holly Marie Combs said, “[Producer Jonathan Levin] said, you know, ‘We’re basically in a position where it’s one or the other. We were told [by Alyssa] that it’s [Shannen] or me, and Alyssa has threatened to sue us for a hostile workplace environment.'” She also said Alyssa allegedly “built a case for herself,” bringing a mediator in to document all the instances she felt uncomfortable.
During a MegaCon panel, Alyssa denied her costars’ allegations. She said, “I’m the most sad that a show that has meant so much to so many people has been tarnished by a toxicity that is still to this day, almost a quarter of a century later, still happening. And I’m sad that people can’t move past it. And I’m sad that we all can’t just celebrate the success of a show that meant so much to all of us.”
Later, on Instagram, Alyssa added, “This was so long ago that any retelling of these stories from anyone is just revisionist history. I will add, though, with absolute certainty—everything was documented. There was a professional mediator (I was told Holly and Shannen would not participate in any mediation) and an on-set producer/babysitter who were both brought in to investigate all claims. It was then recommended by this mediator, after collecting testimony from cast AND crew — what changes should be made if the show was going to continue. The studio, Aaron Spelling, and network made the decision to protect the international hit that was Charmed. I did not have the power to get anyone fired. Once Shannen left we had five more successful seasons and I am forever grateful.”
99.
According to the book Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks, to keep the identity of Laura Palmer’s murderer under wraps, the cast and crew were given fake scripts, and two alternate reveals were shot.
100.
Julianna Margulies’s ER character, Carol Hathaway, wasn’t supposed to last beyond the first episode. On Late Night with Seth Meyers, Julianna said, “Honestly, I owe my career to George Clooney. I do…I seriously owe my career to George Clooney because my character died in the pilot of ER, and I was about to sign onto a not very good sitcom, ’cause I came back to New York. I needed a job. And he called me out of the blue, kind of put his neck out on the line for me, and said, ‘I overheard that your character tested well, and if I were you, I wouldn’t take another job, because I think they’re gonna bring you back to life.'”
Carol became Doug Ross’s main love interest because of the chemistry between Julianna and George. She told People, “That can’t happen if you don’t have a crush on each other. And with George and me, it was so organic. I was just supposed to be a guest star, number 39 on the call sheet. But he treated everyone the same.”
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And finally, on I’ll Fly Away, Jeremy London played Nathan Bedford for two seasons, but his twin brother, Jason London, took over the role for the 90-minute series finale. The show was canceled before shooting on the finale began, and Jeremy had already booked Angel Falls. Ironically, Jason was initially cast as Nathan in the original series but let the part go to Jeremy because he was busy filming a movie.
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