Trivia for
My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) More at IMDbPro »

• Originally developed by Nia Vardalos as a one-woman stage show.
  
  
• The band at the wedding reception plays a brief segment of the song "All My Only Dreams" from another Tom Hanks/Playtone production, That Thing You Do! (1996).
  
  
• On the weekend of October 4-6, 2002, this film surpassed The Blair Witch Project (1999) as the highest-grossing independent film of all time, until March 2004, when it was surpassed by The Passion of the Christ (2004).
  
  
• Outdoor church shots are of the Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Church in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
  
  
• Indoor church shots are of St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
  
  
• The Harry S. Truman College is actually the Rogers Communications building where most media oriented classes are held at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.
  
  
• The school where Ian Miller teaches in the film is actually the Kerr Hall building at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.
  
  
• Nia Vardalos is a Ryerson University graduate. The university was used for several scenes in the film.
  
  
• Nia Vardalos's real-life husband, Ian Gomez, plays Ian's best friend, Mike.
  
  
• Tom Hanks's wife, Rita Wilson, saw the play and recommended that her husband produce a movie version. In an interview with the German magazine "Cinema", Nia Vardalos mentioned that she hung up when Hanks called, because she didn't believe it was really him.
  
  
• In the fall of 2002 it surpassed Dances with Wolves (1990) as the highest grossing movie never to have hit number one at the box office.
  
  
• The film was still running in several theaters after its initial video release.
  
  
• At the wedding reception, no one was doing the dance correctly. The cast was too tired.
  
  
• The film had a special sneak preview at the Montreal Just For Laughs's Comedia film festival in July 2001, as Nia Vardalos was in town performing her one-woman show.
  
  
• The scene where Andrea Martin playfully grabs John Corbett's hair was ad-libbed; Martin had forgotten her lines, played with Corbett's hair (to which Corbett stayed in character and played along), remembered her lines and continued. Nia Vardalos said that it worked out so well they decided to print the take and use it.
  
  
• The opening scene where Nia Vardalos and Michael Constantine travel in the early morning to open the restaurant was one of the very last scenes filled. Vardalos said that all of the other cast members had finished their scenes and had left, and so the sadness she and Constantine had in that car scene reflected the tearful goodbyes they'd said.
  
  
• When Andrea Martin's character learns that John Corbett's character is a vegetarian, she gets a bewildered look and replies, "That's all right. I make lamb." Nia Vardalos said this lines reflects the confusion that many Greeks have toward vegetarianism. During World War 2 when food was scarce, Greeks subsisted on anything available. So, to them, it makes little sense not to eat meat.
  
  
• According to Nia Vardalos, paying for catering during the film proved not to be a problem. Wherever the film was being shot, whenever local Greek restaurants learned about it, they sent over lots of free food.
  
  
• When Toula walks to the front porch of her house in the blue shirt, in the background we see the Greek god of love.
  
  
• For the movie title, the two letter E's in the word "Greek" is made to look like the Greek letter Sigma, which its English equivalent would be the letter S, so if each letter in the title were literally translated, the title would be "My Big Fat Grssk Wedding".
  
  
• Despite being a "xeno", Ian's first name is, in fact, the Greek variant of "John".
  
  

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