Behind-The-Scenes Facts About Rom-Coms We Learned In 2023

Richard Curtis wrote and directed the 2003 Christmas romantic comedy Love Actually. The delightful British film features a stellar ensemble cast with 10 different love stories. In one narrative thread, Karen (Emma Thompson) suspects that her husband is having an affair. After her suspicions are confirmed, she goes into her bedroom to cry. The scene is highlighted by Joni Mitchell’s melancholy Both Sides Now playing in the background.

It’s an emotional and impactful scene that stands out in a movie filled with memorable pieces. Curtis  had the two-time Academy Award winner perform the scene a dozen times, and she nailed it a dozen times, he said:

The extraordinary scene where Emma cries in the bedroom. That was her only job that day. We decided to do it like how Mike Newell did it in Four Weddings – I shot in medium-wide, and didn’t move the camera. We just let it happen, and Emma walked into the room 12 times in a row and sobbed. It was an amazing feat of acting.

Thompson experienced a similar heartache in her own life. She revealed in the Telegraph:

That scene where my character is standing by the bed crying is so well known because it’s something everyone’s been through. I had my heart very badly broken by Ken (Kenneth Branagh). So I knew what it was like to find the necklace that wasn’t meant for me. Well it wasn’t exactly that, but we’ve all been through it.

Nothing was spared in making the sword fight between Westley and Inigo in The Princess Bride as good as possible. Two of the top movie fencing instructors, Bob Anderson and Peter Diamond, were hired to rigorously train Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin for months before filming it. The sequence was one of the last parts filmed so they would have as much time as possible to prepare.

Elwes and Patinkin mastered their parts so well that the sword fight, which had been painstakingly choreographed, was over too quickly. Elwes recalled:

When Bob Anderson and Peter Diamond first showed the sword fight to [director] Rob [Reiner], they did it at what’s known as half-speed. And it timed out at almost three minutes. And by the time Mandy and I… finished rehearsing and… we’d learnt it really well, we showed it to Rob, and it was really fast. I mean, we were really moving. And so it timed out at about a minute.

And after we were done, we were sort of panting and covered in sweat, walked up to Rob Reiner, we’re like, “What do you think?” And he was scratching his beard again and he goes, “That’s it?” And we said, “What do you mean, that’s it?” We’ve been working on this for months, you know? He goes, “Guys, I built this beautiful set for you. I mean, look at it. The Cliffs of Insanity. I mean you’re here, and you’re gonna be in here for a minute? We need longer than that.” So we went back to the drawing board and we added another two minutes to the fight.

Imagine a movie world where Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) do not get together at the end. Well, When Harry Met Sally… director Rob Reiner and writer Nora Ephron originally had an unromantic ending in mind. “Initially they weren’t going to get together,” Reiner revealed in 2019:

We had it where time goes by, they run into each other in the street… and then they walk in opposite directions. I’d been single for 10 years after having been married for 10 years, and I just couldn’t figure out how it would work again.

Thankfully, Reiner met his future wife Michele Singer during production. The relationship made him believe in happy endings.

Jason Segel wrote and starred in the 2008 romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The actor also goes full frontal during a scene at the beginning of the film.

In the memorable scene, Peter (Segel) thinks his girlfriend Sarah (Kristen Bell) is coming over to his house to have sex. He jumps in the shower. When he gets out wearing nothing but a towel, she is already there waiting for him.

Sarah drops a bombshell: She wants to break up. The news hits him like a ton of bricks, and his towel drops to the ground.

The writer used real-life inspiration for the heartbreaking but totally hilarious scene, he said:

That was taken from the pages of real life. I once got dumped while I was naked, but she asked me to put clothes on during this real breakup, my real-life breakup, and as opposed to in the movie when I say no, I did go to put clothes on. So she waited for me while I went back into my room to get dressed.

Picking out an outfit for the second half of a breakup is like the hardest outfit you’ll ever pick out in your life.

Having a crush on your co-star definitely helps with on-set chemistry. However, Michael Vartan’s interest in Drew Barrymore while working on Never Been Kissed led to an embarrassing scenario while filming. In an interview with his co-star for a reunion special, Vartan admitted:

So, I get up to the mound, we embrace and we start kissing, and you [Barrymore] really kissed me. I mean, you really kissed me…

I was not ready for it in the least, and I’m a man, I was a very young man back then, and I had uh, feelings…

I very quickly realized I was in a very bad spot because I was wearing very loose sort of like slacks and I thought, “This is going to be a disaster when they cut, I must preemptively end this.”

So what I did, in a panic, I just yelled cut, and bent over and said, “Oh guys, sorry, my back, I put my back out playing ball”… Anyway, I went off into my corner and… I was thinking horrible thoughts. “Dead puppies, dead puppies”… Finally I was able to compose myself, and luckily the subsequent scenes went on without a hitch.

Renée Zellweger mastered a British accent for 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. Turns out the born-and-bred Texan stuck with the accent during the entire film production.

Co-star Sally Phillips said both she and Hugh Grant never heard Zellweger’s Texas twang until the wrap party:

That’s when I first heard her talking in Texan, and it was a real shock. It was a bit of a surprise because I had made good friends with Bridget it turned out – not with Renée. Because, what is not to love about a British woman charging around saying “f*** ’em” with a giant Toblerone under each arm.

Zellweger took a method approach in her preparation. Sally said the actress worked at a publishing house in London for three weeks. In the movie, Bridget is a publicity assistant at a London publishing company.

“The amazing thing about that is that there’s probably nowhere in the world Renée could go now without being recognized, but she came to the UK and no one had any idea who she was,” added Sally. “So she very effectively went undercover at this publishing firm and not one person thought that she was a movie star.”

John Hughes’s Sixteen Candles is one of the writer/director’s most beloved films from the 1980s, and it features plenty of talent. Among the cast is Gedde Watanabe, who plays Long Duk Dong, a Chinese foreign exchange student whose portrayal wasn’t exactly culturally appropriate. Whenever he entered a scene, a gong sounded, and much of his schtick would be considered racist today.

This wasn’t uncommon in 1984 (or before), but it bears mention because, despite all indications in the film, Watanabe is not foreign-born. While his family heritage is Japanese, he was born and raised in Ogden, UT. He got into acting in high school and later pursued it in California; when he went to audition for Dong, he really wanted the job.

Watanabe was 28 when the movie was filmed, making him one of the oldest “teenagers” in the film. Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall were much closer in age to their characters, but Watanabe was significantly older. On the film’s 35th anniversary, he spilled the beans about how he tricked the casting director into hiring him:

They didn’t know I wasn’t from a foreign country. They didn’t know. They had no idea, and it took a while before they realized that I was from Ogden, Utah. So, it was great, it was a lot of fun.

Notting Hill was destined to be a hit with the combination of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant starring in a Richard Curtis-written film.

Amid the many sweet moments in the movie, one gesture stands out. Anna (Roberts) notices that William (Grant) has a copy of the Marc Chagall painting “La Mariée.”

This seems like a passing remark, but many months later, Anna gifts William with the original version of the painting.

It turns out that the “original” painting on screen was so good, the crew was ordered to destroy it.

As producer Duncan Kenworthy said:

We had to agree to destroy it. They were concerned that if our fake was too good, it might float around the market and create problems.

The scene in 1989’s Say Anything… where Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) holds up a boom box playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” outside Diane Court’s (Ione Skye) home is among the most emotive and memorable images from ’80s rom-coms. It’s been both copied and parodied ever since, and has become an indelible part of the 20th century’s zeitgeist. Even people who’ve never seen Say Anything… likely know the scene of Cusack with the boom box.

Of course, what you see on the screen and what went into making it are often two different things. Dobler stands in front of his car with a scenic copse of trees in the background on a neatly mown lawn. It’s a lovely spot, but it’s not outside Court’s house – it’s outside a 7-Eleven.

The scene was filmed in separate takes; when Skye did hers elsewhere, she revealed, “In my mind, I was like, ‘I hope my stomach isn’t looking fat in this nightgown.’” Cusack wasn’t even there to see it, as he was holding a boom box in a North Hollywood park across from the home of the Slurpee.

The 2004 romantic comedy 50 First Dates marked the second time that Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore teamed up for cinema gold. Lucy (Barrymore) suffers daily amnesia caused by a car accident years prior: when she wakes up each morning, she has no memory of anything that happened after the incident. Henry (Sandler) falls for Lucy despite her affliction and must make her fall in love with him every single day.

While the film does end in mostly happy fashion, with Henry and Lucy married and raising a child together, Lucy’s memory is not cured, with her watching a videotape each morning to be reminded of her life since the event. Director Peter Segal revealed that the movie almost had a far more idyllic resolution:

The studio debated, should Lucy be cured and it be a happy ending? And I’m so glad everyone supported this bittersweet ending because that’s what was so heartbreaking about it, that she has to re-experience this every day. And it’s so amazing what Henry does for her every day. It breaks your heart for both characters, what one has to go through and the other has to endure, and I think that’s part of the charm and heartbreak of it.

The Wedding Singer became Sandler’s first movie to cross the $100 million mark at the box office. The 1998 romantic comedy also proved that the actor could handle more than just slapstick humor. Sandler starred opposite Drew Barrymore, and their chemistry proved so undeniable that they worked together on two more rom-coms, 50 First Dates and Blended.

Despite their clear cinematic attraction, or what Barrymore has referred to as “cinematic soulmates,” the PG-13-rated movie didn’t include any intimate scenes between the two.

Sandler talked about his lack of bedroom prowess during a 1998 interview with Conan O’Brien:

The main reason for not having a sex scene is I’m not good at sex. I started when I was pretty young, and I was always like, “You’ll get better.” And I got older, and it’s still not good.

Pretty Woman was kind of a big deal when it was released in 1990. It was succesful at the box office and made its 21-year-old lead, Julia Roberts, the biggest movie star in the world.

However, the lighthearted rom-com originally had a much darker tone. Screenwriter J.F. Lawton initially titled the movie Three Thousand, which is the amount of money Edward (Richard Gere) paid Vivian (Julia Roberts) for her services for the week. Lawton’s original vision had Vivian (Roberts) as a coke addict and didn’t include the movie’s signature happy ending.

Diane Lane, who was up for a part in the movie, explained:

Everybody in town went for that role. And at that time – as I’ve said on other shows – it’s true, it was a very different show. It kind of got Disney-fied. And what happened was, it turned out to be a feel-good movie. Originally, this crazy bia*ch was kicked out of a rolling limo at the end because she thought that this guy was really in love with her. She was only hired for the weekend. And I had such compassion for her. I think this movie needs to get made.

The writers dropped the addiction subplot and made Pretty Woman into a Generation X fairy tale.

The “Soup Nazi” is the star of one of the most famous episodes of Seinfeld. But it turns out the cranky chef was also referenced in another beloved comedy, Sleepless in Seattle. Annie (Meg Ryan) says:

This man sells the greatest soup you’ve ever eaten, and he is the meanest man in America!

The thing is – Sleepless in Seattle came out a full two years before the Seinfeld episode. So what gives? Were the writers in cahoots? Was it an inside joke among the directors?

Nope – it turns out the Soup Nazi was, in fact, a real guy.

Al Yeganeh ran the very popular soup counter, International Soup Kitchen, in Manhattan in the ’90s. And his depiction in Seinfeld is pretty spot-on. He’d make people stand in a single-file line, limiting any chitchat and specifying that they had to give a clear, succinct soup order at the counter.

And if customers didn’t comply with his rules, Yeganeh would kick them out – sometimes permanently banning them.

Even famous guys who look like Ryan Gosling need moves.

Hannah (Emma Stone) is totally in denial about falling for Jacob (Gosling) and his womanizing ways in 2011’s rom-com Crazy, Stupid, Love. She presses him about his art of seduction, and Jacob admits he uses the famous lift scene from Dirty Dancing as a way to charm the panties off of women. Gosling confessed to co-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa that he used the Patrick Swayze-inspired move in real life.

The filmmakers immediately knew they had to put the famous lift into their movie, Requa said:

He [Gosling] had done the Dirty Dancing lift in real life to a girl. Me and Glenn turned to each other and said, “Okay, that’s going in the movie!” He’s like, “No you can’t put that in the movie.” We put it in, much to his chagrin.

In Dirty Dancing, Baby (Jennifer Grey) and Johnny (Patrick Swayze) practice getting the lift right over and over. It’s the toughest part of their dance routine.

Gosling and Stone also put in the work and practiced the lift for several weeks. “It’s harder than it looks, and it’s scary,” added Ficarra. “Ryan really worked hard. He’s a trained dancer, so he was concentrating on making Emma feel safe.”

The 2008 rom-com 27 Dresses had everything: wild bridesmaids dresses, a love triangle, and perhaps the pettiest (but most warranted) PowerPoint ever presented on-screen.

The film also gave us Jane (Katherine Heigl) and Kevin (James Marsden) sitting at a bar and, after having a few drinks, butchering the lyrics of Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets.” This escalates to them dancing on the bar and, ultimately, hooking up.

However, it turns out that Heigl and Marsden had their own liquid courage to add to their performance. As Marsden explained:

That was the last scene we ever shot for 27 Dresses. It was a night shoot, all night. Once that scene was finished the movie was complete. Katherine and I were like, “Maybe we should actually have a tequila shot or two.” But it was just enough to make us comfortable.

One of the best lines in My Big Fat Greek Wedding actually came from Nia Vardalos’s mother. Vardalos, who starred in and wrote the film, said that when she began writing the screenplay, she would just write down things that had happened to her.

And it turned out her real-life family was full of comedic gold. As Vardalos said:

“Greek women, we might be lambs in the kitchen, but we’re tigers in the bedroom,” is something that my mother said to me while we were making chicken soup. So I threw up in my mouth. And then I wrote it down.

As if! Every generation has its signature teen movie comedy. For Generation X, it was Amy Heckerling’s high school rom-com Clueless.

However, Heckerling’s twist on Jane Austen’s novel Emma was originally pitched as a television show called No Worries. The writer-director went to Fox with her idea about a popular California teen with a positive outlook on life. Fox executives passed on the show, and several other Hollywood studios later passed on the film. Heckerling explained:

Twentieth Century Fox said they wanted a show about teenagers – but not the nerds. They wanted it to be about the cool kids. The most successful character in anything I’d ever done was Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times. People think that’s because he was stoned and a surfer. But that’s not it. It’s because he’s positive. So I thought, “I’m going to write a character who’s positive and happy.” And that was Cher.

Prop masters have a solution for re-creating just about anything from life. They can make a barbell weigh less than a feather or create snow that’s silent to walk on. And they can even come up with a realistic replacement for pubic hair.

Yes, that was the job the prop department was tasked with when it came to the 1999 hit She’s All That. The scene in question involved two bullies picking on Laney’s (Rachael Leigh Cook) little brother Simon (playing by the very young Kieran Culkin). While one of the bullies distracts Simon, the other pulls out some of his pubic hair, and adds it on top of Simon’s pizza.

Zack (Freddie Prinze Jr.) then enters, sees what’s happening, and makes the bully eat the pizza himself.

The camera zooms in on the disgusting topping, making the audience’s stomach flip. But it turns out this hair was nothing more than cornstalk (or, more precisely, we assume they mean the hair-like silk that lives within the cornstalk).

Better Off Dead is about a young man, Lane Myer (John Cusack), who becomes suicidal after his girlfriend dumps him. Fortunately, he’s incredibly inept at carrying out the act, and with each failure, he realizes he has more to live for.

Granted, it doesn’t hurt that Myer’s neighbor is a hot foreign exchange student, and also that he has an opportunity to show up the guy who took his girl, so the flick has everything you’d expect from an ’80s dark rom-com, including hallucinations and a newspaper boy who will do anything to collect his $2.

Someone who helped make Better Off Dead a reality was Henry Winkler, of Happy Days fame. Director Savage Steve Holland described the long process of getting the movie made:

It’s almost a miracle we ever got Better Off Dead made, especially knowing what I know now and the way the business is. I was a doofus out of college, and I just thought maybe what I was doing was the way it works all the time.

Winkler and Holland first met in the early 1980s, when the latter’s autobiographical short film My 11-Year-Old Birthday Party opened the LA Film Festival. Holland recalled:

Henry took me to lunch, and he said that my movie was so funny. And I’m like, “Well, wait a minute – it wasn’t supposed to be funny, it’s a sad story about my life.” So he asked if I had any more sad stories about my life and I’m like, “Of course I do!”

Although Winkler had a production company, he didn’t end up producing the film. He brought Holland and his script for Better Off Dead to the attention of a studio, which then hooked Holland up with Cusack, after which Holland sold the idea to producer Michael Jaffe – and the rest is history.

The role of angry mob boss Tony Soprano made James Gandolfini a household name. After The Sopranos wrapped in 2007, the actor put away his rage and played against type in Nicole Holofcener’s 2013 middle-age romantic comedy Enough Said. In the film, Albert (Gandolfini) is a funny, sweet teddy bear who tries to make a love connection with Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).

Turns out Albert is a lot more in line with Gandolfini’s personality than Tony Soprano ever was. “You can see his abilities were very deep,” said Louis-Dreyfus. “He was an amazing actor. In fact, this part that he plays is much closer to him than Tony Soprano was, in so many ways, which I think will be nice for his fans to see.”

Enough Said became one of the last roles of Gandolfini’s career. In 2013, the actor succumbed to a heart attack at age 51. Holofcener talked about how insecure Gandolfini felt as a romantic comedy lead:

Had Jim lived, I’m sure he would’ve had an enormously diverse career ahead of him. It’s funny, because on the set he was constantly joking about being fired. It was like he was asking me, “You cast me in this part? Are you sure I can pull this off?” I knew he could, and I think a part of him knew he could as well. He was just a bit embarrassed about it.