Trivia / The Name of the Rose

• Died During Production: Helmut Qualtinger, who played Remigio de Varagine, just barely managed to avert this. Already seriously ill with a liver condition during production, he frequently had to interrupt his lines with the amount of pain he was in. He died five days after the film first released in theaters.
• Dueling Works: This was not the only medieval-themed movie Sean Connery did in 1986, as Connery co-starred in Highlander the same year.
• Enforced Method Acting: According to Jean-Jacques Annaud, the wordless sex scene was not choreographed in order to get more awkwardly authentic performances from the actors, particularly since Adso is a sheltered teen monk losing his virginity. The actors also kept cuddling after the cameras stopped rolling, so the director and crew just dimmed the lights and left them alone.
• Fake Nationality: Most of the characters. Not counting the almost complete lack of Italians for the main cast (even the girl is Chilean-French). Adso (Austrian) and Bernardo Gui (French) are played by American actors. William, an Englishman, is played by a Scotsman, and Jorge, a Spaniard, by a Russian.
• Hostility on the Set: According to Jean-Jacques Annaud's DVD Commentary, F. Murray Abraham was extremely difficult to work with. The actor was coming off his Oscar win for Amadeus and was apparently an "egomaniac" on the set, always keen to remark that he was an Academy Award winner, while Sean Connery was not.^note  Connery would, a few short years later, win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables.
• Life Imitates Art: The Sacra di San Michele partially inspired Umberto Eco to write the novel. Like the ending, the building has had a fire in January 2018.
• Looping Lines: All of the dialogue had to be re-dubbed in post-production, as the location sound was ruined by aircraft noise.
• Playing Against Type: Sean Connery, one of cinema's most iconic male sex symbols, plays a virgin Celibate Hero who apparently considers women to be foul creatures purposefully designed by God to tempt man (the book shows the character specifically questioning the latter very common belief, so the interpretation may not be fair for the movie either.) This actually was the main reason Jean-Jacques Annaud's refusal to have Connery play the main role. But the man himself begged so much to at least get an audition, Annaud finally gave in, to be blown away by the performance.
  • The film itself gets some mileage out of this: when Adso informs William of what happened with the girl, William bemusedly reminds Adso that, having kept to his vow of celibacy, he doesn't have any experience in that area himself. It wouldn't be half as funny if it were anyone other than Sean Connery saying it.
• Prop Recycling: The cloak worn by Alec Guinness in Star Wars may have been used to costume one of the monks in this film. The cloak was owned at the time by Bermans, a British costume supply house that was one of several such companies from which costumes for this film were sourced.
• Reality Subtext: For the Italian "years of lead". The authoritarian, crypto-fascist security forces and the violent Marxist revolutionaries are recast as the medieval Catholic Church and the proto-socialist Dulcinians. Eco's following novel, Foucault's Pendulum, would drop the "subtext" part entirely.
• Referenced by...:
  • In Dissolution, Scarnsea Abbey has a copy of Aristotle's "On Comedy" - "a fake, of course, thirteenth-century Italian".
  • From the album Neon Bible: "Take the poison of your age / Don't lick your finger as you turn the page"
• What Could Have Been:
  • Robert De Niro auditioned for William, but director Jean-Jacques Annaud changed his mind because De Niro wanted to have a sword duel between William and Bernardo Gui. Marlon Brando, Michael Caine, Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Ian McKellen, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Christopher Plummer, Roy Scheider, Terence Stamp, Donald Sutherland and Max von Sydow, were also considered.
  • Among the other actors considered for the movie there were John Huston (Jorge), Jack Palance (Malachia), Adolfo Celi or Philippe Noiret (the Abbott), Jean Rochefort (Bernardo Gui) and Michel Galabru (Remigio).

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