André the Giant's Pain Management on Set The Princess Bride (1987)

André René Roussimoff was forty years old when The Princess Bride shot in late 1986 and early 1987. He was, by then, more than a decade into the late-stage symptoms of acromegaly — the pituitary disorder that had given him his height (7'4") and weight (520 pounds at the time of the shoot) and was now degrading his joints, his spine, and his cardiovascular system. The pain management required to get him through the production was substantial, openly discussed by everyone involved, and is one of the better-documented anecdotes of late-1980s Hollywood physical-acting work.¹

What acromegaly does

Acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on the pituitary gland that produces excess growth hormone. In adults — when the long bones have already fused — the excess hormone causes the bones of the hands, feet, jaw, and forehead to thicken, the soft tissues to enlarge, and the joints to bear loads they were not built to carry. By the mid-1980s, André's spine had begun to fail and his hips and knees were progressively painful. He had refused major surgery for most of his career on the grounds that recovery would have ended his wrestling income.²

"André was in pain every day of the shoot. He wouldn't say so. He would just get quieter. You learned to read him by how much he was talking. The quieter he got, the more it hurt." — Cary Elwes, As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride (2014) (book, not available online)

The wrestling scene

The most physically demanding scene for André was the wrestling match with Westley near the top of the Cliffs of Insanity.^b13 The script called for André to lift, hold, and grapple Cary Elwes through several minutes of choreography — work that any healthy heavyweight wrestler could have managed but that the 1986 André's back could not safely sustain.

The production's solution was extensive rigging. A wire system was installed to support roughly half of Elwes's body weight during the lifts, and the camera was positioned to hide both the wires and the angle of André's strain. The wrestling moves André does perform — the headlocks, the ground holds — were rehearsed at half-speed and shot in short bursts so that André could rest between takes. The total scene was assembled from many short takes rather than the long-take work that characterized the Inigo–Westley duel.³

Rob Reiner has said that a longer cut of the wrestling scene exists but that he chose not to use it because the strain on André was visible.⁴

The pain medication

André's regimen during the shoot — described in detail in Elwes's memoir, in the 30 for 30 documentary André the Giant (2018), and in trainer Bill Eadie's interviews — included prescription painkillers, anti-inflammatories, and an industrial quantity of alcohol used for both pain management and sleep. Producer Andrew Scheinman has described the production's quiet arrangement to keep stocked beer in André's trailer at all times as an explicit medical accommodation rather than a vice.⁵

"André drank because his back hurt. We weren't enabling a drinker; we were treating a man with a degenerative disease the only way he would accept treatment. He didn't trust hospitals. He trusted the things he had been using for twenty years." — Andrew Scheinman, André the Giant (HBO, 2018) (documentary, available on HBO Max)

The reported quantities — a case of beer over the course of an evening, sometimes more — would have been incapacitating for an average-sized adult. In André's body mass, and against the chronic background of acromegalic pain, they functioned as a baseline analgesic.⁶

The bedroom rescue scene¹

The carry of Buttercup down the castle stairs — Fezzik (André) carrying Buttercup (Robin Wright) in his arms — was the second physically demanding setup. Wright weighed roughly 110 pounds; the carry would normally have been within a healthy 7'4" wrestler's range. The 1986 André's back could not sustain the load over multiple takes. The solution: Wright was supported on a hidden brace built into Fezzik's tunic, and the carry was rehearsed without weight before takes.⁷

"I was sitting on a kind of shelf inside his costume. André was carrying maybe a third of my weight. He insisted he could do more. We were all very firm with him that he could not." — Robin Wright, Vanity Fair (2012)

How the cast and crew thought about him

The accommodations made for André are not described in the production literature as inconveniences. Every memoir, interview, and oral history of the production treats them as straightforward acts of care for a colleague who was working through serious pain to give a generous performance. Elwes's memoir devotes a long chapter to André; Mandy Patinkin has said in interviews that André was the gentlest person on the set; Rob Reiner has called him "the soul of the production."⁸

"We loved him. Everyone did. The whole production was organized around taking care of him while letting him do the work. He gave us the performance. We just had to make it possible." — Rob Reiner, Vanity Fair (2012)

After the shoot

André underwent spinal-fusion surgery in 1986–1987, around the time of the Princess Bride production, and continued wrestling — including the famous WrestleMania III match against Hulk Hogan in March 1987 — through chronic pain for several more years. He died in January 1993 at forty-six, of congestive heart failure secondary to his acromegaly. His participation in The Princess Bride was, by his own account in interviews and by the consensus of those who worked with him, the role he was proudest of.⁹

"He carried that movie around with him for the rest of his life. He'd go to a restaurant and somebody would yell 'Anybody want a peanut?' across the room, and he'd just light up. It was the gift the film gave him." — Cary Elwes, As You Wish (2014) (book, not available online)