Trivia / Fierce Creatures

• Acting for Two: Kevin Kline as both the McCains.
• Creator Backlash: John Cleese was asked what he would do differently if he could live his life over. He responded that he wouldn't have made this film.
• Executive Meddling: The studio disliked the cut of the film that Robert Young turned in, which led to Fred Schepisi being hired to reshoot anything between just the ending or nearly half of the film, depending on who you believe. It could be half, since Fierce Creatures seems a bit more watered down with the language when comparing it to A Fish Called Wanda.
• Fake Australian:
  • Kevin Kline puts on an Australian accent as Rod McCain and when Vince is pretending to be Rod.
  • Robert Lindsay is British playing the Australian zookeeper Lotterby.
• Fake Nationality: Rollo Lee is established before we see him as a Chinese man who "speaks very good English" - the joke being that Rollo is played by the very white and very British John Cleese. No Yellow Face here - later we see photographs of Rollo's youth in China and no effort is made to make him resemble the real Chinese people in the pictures.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The trailer contains a clip from the original ending, where Vince suffers a Groin Attack from a charging rhino.
• Production Posse: A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures both share the same four actors: John Cleese, Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Palin. In fact, Cleese reunited the cast specifically because he enjoyed working with Kline, Curtis, and Palin so much. Maria Aitken, who played Wendy (Archie's wife) in Wanda, also returns, this time playing Rollo's secretary. And Cleese's daughter Cynthia, who played his daughter in Wanda, here plays the blonde zookeeper. Tom Georgeson, who played George in Wanda, has a cameo as a zoo patron watching the sea lion show.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Bugsy is a Motor Mouth to allow Michael Palin to speak more than he had in Wanda - as there he played a stutterer.
• Those Two Actors: Note: This is not a sequel to Wanda.
• Troubled Production: The film had its release delayed by nearly a year after the initial cut of the film got a severely underwhelming reaction from test audiences. The official line from the studio and writer-star John Cleese was that due to Michael Palin being unavailable for several months, and then director Robert Young having moved onto directing an adaptation of Jane Eyre, Fred Schepisi was hired to reshoot the ending, with both Young and Schepisi agreeing afterwards to share credit. However, other sources have indicated that Schepisi actually reshot most of the second half of the film — something backed up by several characters and sub-plots suddenly vanishing just after the halfway point — which has been variously ascribed to Cleese simply being unhappy with Young's work, the studio wanting something with more appeal to family audiences, and/or the main villain having to be substantially rewritten when Rupert Murdoch threatened to bury the film under litigation after finding out that the villain was an extremely blatant and unflattering caricature of him.

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