Trivia / M. Butterfly

• Actor-Shared Background: Before he was a film actor, John Lone trained in Peking Opera. He even gets to sing a little.
• California Doubling: Aside from some locations shots, the film was shot mostly in Toronto. The Paris opera house, the French courtroom, and the prison where Gallimmard is held were all filmed in Hungary.
• Fake Nationality:
  • The various stage versions usually don't cast an actual Frenchman as Gallimard. John Lithgow from the original run is American (later replaced by the Welsh Anthony Hopkins) and Clive Owen from the 2017 revival is English. Jeremy Irons in the movie is also English, and his wife is played by German actress Barbara Sukowa
  • The film only has a single French actor (Vernon Dobtcheff) in the cast. Everyone else is either British or Canadian (all with English accents).
  • Comrade Chin is played by Japanese actress Shizuko Hoshi in the film.
• Half-Remembered Homage: David Henry Hwang got his inspiration from a news story he heard over the radio. But he wanted his play to be an original creation rather than a Ripped from the Headlines piece, so he changed the names of all the characters and purposefully didn't do any more research into the news story.
• Playing Against Type: In a directing case, a period romantic drama directed by David Cronenberg. Yes, that Cronenberg.
• Spoiled by the Cast List: Averted in the original production where B.D. Wong was credited by his initials to avoid spoiling The Reveal about Song's gender.
• What Could Have Been: Peter Weir passed on the chance to direct.

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