Cary Elwes: ‘My job was to get Marlon out of his trailer’
The film star talks to Tim Robey about working with Brando and being related to the real-life Scrooge
Well before Cary Elwes shot to fame as the dashing swordsman in The Princess Bride (1987), he had the tricky assignment of babysitting Marlon Brando. Then 16 years old, the Londonborn Elwes wasn’t yet an actor, but when an assistant director on
Superman (1978) fell ill for a few days, he made himself handy.
“My job was to get Marlon out of his trailer,” Elwes tells me. “Marlon had no incentive to be on time, because his agent had struck the most amazing deal for him. Every day that the picture went over, he got another million dollars. So he drove poor [Richard] Donner up the wall, because he just strolled in whenever he felt like it. Sometimes before lunch, sometimes… not before lunch.”
Coaxing the beast from its lair “involved some comedy”, as he puts it. “How did I manage it? Mainly with food. Once you fed Marlon, he was in a much better mood. So I tried to find delicacies that appealed to him, which were limited at Shepperton at the time. He mainly wanted desserts.”
Elwes, now 59, is at home in Los Angeles when we speak. The star of
Saw has a daughter, Dominique, with his wife, the actress and photographer Lisa Marie Kurbikoff.
He’s in two seasonal comedies – the already-released Netflix romance A Castle for Christmas, with Brooke Shields, and an eccentric, highconcept British yarn called Last Train to Christmas, where he essentially plays Jacob Marley to Michael Sheen’s Scrooge, and sports a differently absurd orange wig in every scene
(pictured, below right).
Pointing to the Dickens volumes behind his desk, Elwes explains why he knows more than most about A Christmas Carol. One of his ancestors was the infamously miserly John Elwes (1714-89), long known to be the model for Ebenezer Scrooge. This raggedly dressed MP for Berkshire would do almost anything to avoid a coach fare.
“I want everybody to know that I have not inherited those particular qualities,” Elwes wryly insists.
Even among the crop of British actors who thrived in the 1980s – Colin Firth, James Wilby, Hugh Grant – Elwes boasted perhaps the best and floppiest hair of them all, which he proudly retains to this day.
First, after training in New York under Al Pacino’s mentor, Elwes made his mark in Another Country (1984), as a gay schoolboy beloved of Rupert Everett, and then starred in Lady Jane (1986) as Lord Guildford Dudley, husband of the short-lived queen played by Helena Bonham Carter.
It was this performance that netted him the Princess Bride role – even beating out his old friend Firth. Rob Reiner’s swashbuckling fantasy is remembered as a classic, but it was the VHS era that embraced it after the modest impact it had in cinemas. William Goldman’s script had been passed from director to director – John Boorman, François Truffaut, Robert Redford – and every studio in town had said no. The marketing department at Fox were confounded.
“The trailer was a challenge because they didn’t know who to sell it to. Was
it a kids’ movie, a fantasy, a comedy? And of course it was all these things.”
Still, everyone on the Sheffield shoot had the time of their lives. Elwes got to know Mandy Patinkin especially well, since they spent every spare hour training for the famous swordfight. They also had in common the deaths of their fathers at a young age – Patinkin’s to cancer, and Elwes’s dad, the portrait painter (and gambling chum of Lord Lucan) Dominick Elwes, to suicide in 1975, when Cary was just 13.
“I was deeply affected,” he says, dropping his gaze. “[Dominick] was a great influence on me because he was a great raconteur, a great storyteller, mimic and comedian. Years ago, Peter Ustinov told a friend of mine that when my father came into the room, even he would go quiet.
“He provided me with so much entertainment as a kid that I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
True to this ethos, Elwes has had an unusually busy pandemic. He’ll appear in both Mission: Impossible 7
and Guy Ritchie’s spy thriller Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre,
which have been shot with ultrastrict Covid protections in place. Not to mention NDAS. He might dish me details of either plot, but then – I imagine at the twirling end of a blade – he would have to kill me.
Last Train to Christmas is on Sky Cinema from December 18