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

• Originally developed by Nia Vardalos as a one-woman stage show. The film had a special sneak preview at the Montreal Just For Laughs's Comedy film festival in July 2001, as she was performing in the same city.
  
  
• Outdoor church shots are of the Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Church in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Indoor church shots are of Toronto's St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church.
  
  
• Nia Vardalos is a Ryerson University graduate. The university was used for several scenes in the film. Kerr Hall is the school where Ian Miller teaches. The Rogers Communications building plays Harry S. Truman College.
  
  
• 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 the film surpassed Dances with Wolves (1990) as the highest grossing movie never to have hit number one at the box office. By the weekend of October 4-6, it 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). Theatres continued to run the film after its initial video release.
  
  
• At the wedding reception, no one was doing the dance correctly. The cast was too tired.
  
  
• 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 reflects the confusion that many Greeks have toward vegetarianism. During World War II, food was scarce, so Greeks subsisted on anything available. 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.
  
  
• In the movie poster, the two E's in the word "Greek" are made to look like the Greek letter Sigma, which is S, not E. To a Greek, it reads "My Big Fat Grssk Wedding".
  
  

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