'The Princess Bride' Star Cary Elwes Adds More Epic Drinking Tales to the Legend of Andre the Giant
Andre the Giant with Robin Wright and Wallace Shawn in ‘The Princess Bride’
Andre the Giant was quite the drinking buddy, according to his Princess Bride co-star Cary Elwes. The late professional wrestler, born André René Roussimoff, is best remembered for playing good-natured giant Fezzik in Rob Reiner’s 1987 fairy-tale film. He was, by all reports, a lovely man — with a serious appetite for liquor. Speaking with The Daily Beast, Elwes, who is promoting his Princess Bride memoir As You Wish, recalls a time that Andre passed out drunk in a hotel lobby after a script reading. Rather than trying to move the enormous man, the hotel management decided to surround him with a velvet rope.
“There’s no shifting a 550-pound, 7-foot-4 giant, so they had a choice: either call the authorities, and they didn’t want that kind of publicity, or wait for him to wake up, which was the wiser decision,” said Elwes, who played the film’s sardonic pirate hero.
Elwes is quick to point out that his friend drank as a form of self-medication. Between his wrestling injuries and the symptoms of acromelagy (the disease that caused his gigantism), Andre had chronic back pain. “He was due to have an operation right after the shoot, and his doctor didn’t know what kind of pain medication to give him because of his size, so the only way that he could deal with the pain was to drink alcohol,” recalled Elwes. “And it didn’t affect him at all. He didn’t flub a line or miss a day.”
Andre’s drink of choice, as documented in As You Wish, was a 40-ounce blend of liquors that he dubbed “The American.” He would reportedly drink several in one sitting, and at one point, he convinced Elwes to try it. “I’ve never tasted airplane fuel, but I imagine it’s very close to what that must taste like,” Elwes told The Daily Beast. “It’s very potent indeed, and I remember coughing a lot. But to him, it was like chugging water.”
Cary Elwes and Andre the Giant in ‘The Princess Bride’
Stories of Andre’s drinking have been the stuff of legend since before his Princess Bride days. To quote a 2007 episode of WWE’s Legends of Wrestling,“Most of the stories — the times he drank over a hundred beers at a sitting, the occasions on which he imbibed multiple bottles of blended whiskey before dinner, several bottles of wine with dinner, and then cognac with dessert — are hard to substantiate, because his drinking partners were seldom conscious at the finish.” One of those rumors — that he drank 117 beers in one night — was confirmed by Andre himself during a 1984 interview with David Letterman. At the time of the interview, the wrestler said he had quit drinking beer in order to reduce his weight from 560 to 470 pounds (though he copped to the occasional “2 or 3 bottles” of white wine with dinner).
True to his French heritage, Andre, who owned a French restaurant in Montreal, also had an appetite for good food. In an interview with Yahoo in 2012, Elwes revealed that Andre used to visit his family in France on days off, and return with delicacies for the Princess Bride cast and crew. “He came back with foie gras, paté, and baguettes,” said Elwes. “And the crew just loved him for that. He brought crates of the stuff back.”
The role of Fezzik was written by William Goldman with Andre the Giant in mind, though Elwes says in his memoir that both Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Bond villain Richard Kiel were considered. Andre died in 1993 of congestive heart failure caused by acromegaly.
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Photo credit: Everett
