Trivia / Home Movie: The Princess Bride

• Acting for Two:
  • Nick Kroll plays Inigo, Fezzik and Vizzini all at once during the boat scene.
  • Penélope Cruz plays both Humperdinck and Buttercup during one scene.
• All-Star Cast: A grand total of 90 actors were involved in this production, most of whom are recognizable stars in their own right, making this potentially one of the most star-studded live-action motion picture productions ever.
• Dawson Casting: Played for Laughs; four of the seven actors portraying the Grandson, who was played in the original by a ten-year-old, are clearly adults, with the youngest two actors being fourteen and looking a little too old to be requesting bedtime stories. One of those is the Grandson's original actor, Fred Savage, 43 years old at the time of this production. Taken to an extreme with Rob Reiner, who was 73 at the time.
• Died During Production: Carl Reiner, father of the director of the original film, portrays the Grandfather in his final filmed performance. He passed away three days after recording his scene, the day the series premiered.
• Doing It for the Art: Every single one of the actors and crew donated their time to this production, which was created to raise money for the World Central Kitchen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Director Jason Reitman instructed all of the actors to "think like kids" for their respective segments, leading to the scrappy "kids' home movie" feel of the production.
• Fake Nationality: Out of the eleven actors who play Inigo Montoya, Javier Bardem is the only Spaniard. Four others are of some other Hispanic nationality with Spanish ancestry- Chilean-American Pedro Pascal, Mexican/British Diego Luna, and Cuban-American Oscar Nuñez and Natalie Morales.
• In Memoriam: Carl Reiner, father of the director of the original film, narrates the ending of the story, and passed away three days after recording his scene, the day the series premiered. The series as a whole is dedicated to his memory.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Some of the humor is from some actors being radically different from the characters they're supposed to be playing, such as 5'4" Zoey Deutch playing the giant Fezzik.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: In early January 2021, approximately five months after this series ended its run on the platform, Quibi was shut down and its library was sold to Roku, who later announced that they would be releasing the platform's entire original library on one of their free ad-supported channels. Unfortunately, this series was not included in the Roku acquisition due to its legal status as a remake of a preexisting film with rights partially owned by the estate of William Goldman, author of the original The Princess Bride novel upon which the 1987 film was based. By May 2021, Quibi's official YouTube channel had been set to private, including this series' trailer and the full fourth episode, scrubbing the last of the series' officially released material from public viewing. According to a June 2021 Vanity Fair article, the only remaining legal way to watch this series was a private streaming service accessible only to Emmy voters for the 2020 awards season, and the creators of the series were hoping that the series might hopefully capture enough attention through the Emmys for it to be released to the public somehow once more. Despite- or perhaps because of -this, people have been able to easily continue illegally distributing it, even on YouTube.
• No Stunt Double: Everybody acted out their own stunts, because this is supposed to be a home movie. For the scene where Westley and Buttercup roll down the hill, a stairwell stands in for the hill, and the characters are substituted with garbage bags loosely stuffed with some other clothes for weight and volume, "dressed" in the characters' costumes, and then tossed down the stairs with their dialogue dubbed in post. (The "Buttercup" trash bag has a blonde wig affixed to it, and the wig falls off once it reaches the bottom.)
• The Other Darrin: The vast majority of the main characters are portrayed by multiple actors, changing actors at least after each scene (and sometimes within scenes). Buttercup has the most at seventeen actors- not counting Robin Wright in footage from the original -three of whom are men.
• Production Posse: Seven of the actors had previously been directed by Jason Reitman in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (including Logan Kim, for whom Afterlife was his first-ever film role).
• Reality Subtext:
  • Westley's remark about how he thinks everybody will be wearing masks in the future, recreated here precisely, takes on a darkly humorous bent considering that this series was shot in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic, when everybody was urged to wear masks in public.
  • Stephen Merchant's parts involve cardboard props that are clearly made from Amazon boxes, a grim reminder that delivery services like Amazon saw a boom during this period.
• Role Reprise: Fred Savage returns over thirty years later to play the Grandson, even though he was 43 years old at the time of shooting this series.
• Underage Casting: Inevitable with how much Colorblind Casting is in this production; most instances are actors' clearly too-young children playing characters that are adults in the original, with no attempt to make them look older. Like everything else, it's Played for Laughs.
  • During Tom Lennon's turn as Humperdinck, his son Oliver, eleven years old at the time of shooting, plays Count Rugen for the early search for Buttercup.
  • For Patton Oswalt's turn as Vizzini during the Battle of Wits, his daughter Alice, eleven years old at the time of shooting, plays Buttercup.
  • At 50, Sarah Silverman is the youngest of the actors to play the Grandfather. She wears a silver wig, graying bushy mustache and eyebrows, and a suit, and puts on something like an exaggerated East Coast or Philly accent ("Yes, you're very smaht."). Never mind that unless some people were having kids very young, fifty is pretty young to have an eleven-year-old grandchild, and makeup aside, she doesn't look fifty, anyway.

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