Dispatch • Cary Elwes on 'The Princess Bride' and the Film’s Long Road Home

When Cary Elwes walked onto the stage of the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles on May 4, he was met with an ovation that felt less like a greeting than a debt being repaid: for nearly 40 years of The Princess Bride, and for what it meant to those fortunate enough to find it. The movie premiered in September 1987, underwhelmed at the box office, yet became one of the most beloved ever made—not because critics could make it so, but because people brought it home and cherished it, watching the VHS until the tape wore thin.

Its rich history filled the venue, where Elwes appeared during this year’s Netflix is a Joke Festival for a conversation about the making of The Princess Bride and the late Rob Reiner, who directed it. Moderated by Maurice LaMarche, the evening moved between gentle reverence and easy laughter; Reiner, who died last December, was present anyway, folded into every story Elwes told about him, audible in the pauses before he found the right words.

The film Reiner spent years trying to make is, at heart, a fairy tale: Buttercup (Robin Wright) and Westley (Elwes), separated by fate, pirates, and the schemes of a cruel prince and a six-fingered count, finding their way back to each other through sword fights and at least one mostly-dead miracle. Framed as a story a grandfather (Peter Falk) reads aloud to his grandson (Fred Savage), it blends absurdity and sincerity so close together that it stops feeling like a satire of fairy tales and more like a warm argument for them.

Reiner had wanted to make the film since he was 13. William Goldman, who wrote the original 1973 novel and adapted it himself, spent years watching the project stall at several different studios before the late Norman Lear agreed to finance it personally, writing a check for $16 million at a moment when no major studio would greenlight a postmodern fairy tale with two unknown leads. That Lear later called it the best investment he ever made is the kind of ending Goldman might have written himself.

Elwes spoke of Reiner with the rare affection reserved for people who altered the course of your life. “The most beautiful guy,” he said. “The most wonderful director I’ve ever worked with and will ever work with.” What came through wasn’t simply admiration for the director’s craft but gratitude for the on-set atmosphere he created. Every day, Elwes said, brought laughter. “When you feel the joy watching this film, when you get those little butterflies, that’s what we were feeling while we were making it,” he added.

At the film’s table read, Reiner gave the cast a note. The material might seem silly at times, he told them, but they didn’t need to reach for the comedy; it was already there in the writing. Just believe it. That sense of authenticity is arguably part of why the film has aged so gracefully. Westley means what he says; Inigo’s grief has real weight. Buttercup’s heartbreak feels genuine. The fairy tale survives because no one inside it treated the feelings as insincere or throwaway.

Of course, no evening devoted to The Princess Bride was going to stay solemn for long. Much of the audience’s delight came from Elwes’ stories about André René Roussimoff, better known as André the Giant, whom he described as “seven foot four, 450 pounds of pure love.” He could eclipse Robin Wright’s entire face by simply placing one hand over her head, Elwes said, and hugged people so completely they temporarily ceased to exist. Ordinary spaces struggled to contain him: hotel beds, airplane cabins, and doorways, which André had to bend double to enter.

During filming in England’s Peak District, the production tracked down a specially reinforced Honda three-wheeler ATV so André could navigate the hills between locations. He immediately turned it into a form of personal amusement. Elwes recalled watching him tear across the landscape, grinning, while crew members gave chase and André periodically slowed down just enough to let them think they were catching up before accelerating away again.

Eventually, André pulled up beside Elwes between setups and asked whether he wanted a turn.

The answer led to disaster almost immediately. Elwes caught his left big toe between a rock and the clutch pedal, bending it backward until it snapped. A week into filming, convinced he was about to be fired, he tried to hide the injury rather than leave the set. The production medic improvised a splint using half a wooden tongue depressor. Wardrobe cut open the back of his boot to get it back on his foot. Elwes rode back to the set in the longest van ride of his life and leapt out on both feet, fighting the pain, walking straight toward Reiner without a trace of a limp.

It was, the actor mused, the best acting he ever did. But Reiner actually already knew the truth. News of his injury had gone out over the crew’s walkie-talkies half an hour earlier.

Elwes apologized. He admitted he’d been afraid of losing the role. “How can I fire you?” Reiner said. “You’re the only guy who could play Westley.” It was, in hindsight, the best kind of reassurance.

There were other mishaps. A second hospital visit followed after Christopher Guest accidentally knocked Elwes unconscious with a real sword. The prop version had been left hours away at the studio, and the stunt coordinator convinced everyone to use the genuine article, carefully.

Elwes came to on an operating table in full Dread Pirate Roberts costume while the same doctor who had treated his broken toe stitched up his head and observed, with what sounded like professional resignation, that he seemed “very accident prone.”

The affection in the room made it easy to forget how uncertain the film’s future once looked. Elwes reminded the audience that the movie was a commercial disappointment when it premiered in 1987, eking out just $30 million at the global box office.

The cast, at the time, believed in it completely. They had Reiner fresh off This Is Spinal Tap and Stand By Me, Goldman adapting his own novel, and Lear financing it personally. After The Princess Bride screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Reiner got a call at JFK Airport from the studio: the box office projections were lackluster. He gathered the cast at dinner and told them he remained proud of what they had made. But if he had the chance, he would make it all over again with every one of them, he said. People cried; then they all had to go to the theater and put on smiles for the audience.

The story could have ended there, if not for the surprising long tail of home video. What followed was one of cinema’s quieter second acts. The Princess Bride hit VHS in 1988, and the film’s afterlife began. It also became, unmistakably, a shared language. “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” moved from Patinkin’s mouth into the cultural zeitgeist: dorm rooms, family kitchens, schoolyards, wedding speeches, office banter, and the strange permanent theater of the internet. “Inconceivable,” “as you wish,” “mostly dead”—the lines became passwords, ways of recognizing another person who loved the same impossible thing.

Elwes was central to that afterlife because Westley could so easily have been reduced to a swoon-worthy caricature. He was, of course, almost impossibly beautiful in the film—he and Wright both were—all golden hair and storybook certainty. But what made the performance last was never beauty alone. It was the wit inside the gallantry, the intelligence behind the romance, the comic self-awareness that kept Westley from becoming stiff or ornamental. Elwes played him as both the fairy-tale hero and a man clever enough to know what kind of story he was in.

Parents watched it with children; children showed it to younger siblings. Tapes circulated between neighbors and friends until some wore out entirely. Elwes described fans bringing him battered copies once owned by grandparents, the ribbon itself beginning to unspool from the cassette.

Near the end of the night, Elwes looked out at the packed theater with disbelief. Almost 40 years later, he said, people had still shown up on a weeknight to watch it together. “That honestly is inconceivable to me,” he said.

Then he told one more story about Reiner. While touring for his 2016 book “As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride,” Elwes told the director he sometimes felt like an “ambassador of love,” because the film was an unabashed purveyor of it. Reiner understood immediately. “That’s what you are,” he responded.

In another room, on another night, that might have registered as overly sentimental. Here, it felt closer to truth. The Princess Bride always understood what modern culture sometimes forgets: sincerity isn’t naivete, and love—blinding, steadfast love, the kind Westley means when he utters “as you wish”—isn’t a childish idea simply because it leaves you exposed.

Elwes became part of that tradition too, bringing his stories with him, keeping Reiner’s warmth alive. What Reiner used to tell him resurfaced again and again: once the movie is released, it belongs to other people. But while you’re making it, that’s your time on the planet; so you want to make it good.

He certainly did. He made a fairy tale funny enough to quote, tender enough to keep, and trusting enough to survive an era more at ease with irony than unflinching belief. Maybe that’s what The Princess Bride has always really been about, underneath the sword fights and clever dialogue: the willingness to hand what you love to a stranger, something openhearted and sincere, and trust them with it. Reiner did that; Elwes is still proudly doing it. On a Monday night in Los Angeles, a theater full of strangers did it, too.

The Princess Bride is available to stream on Disney+.