Cary Elwes's Toe Injury The Princess Bride (1987)

Roughly two weeks into the production of The Princess Bride, Cary Elwes broke his big toe driving an ATV that belonged to André the Giant. The injury was hidden from the production for several days, then concealed in the on-screen blocking for the rest of the shoot, and is now visible in retrospect in several scenes — most clearly in the moment Westley is supposed to drop down off a wall and instead lands on his good foot first.

The accident

Elwes has told the story consistently across his memoir, his interview circuit for the memoir's 2014 release, and the 2012 Vanity Fair oral history. André the Giant kept a four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle on the location near Haddon Hall, which he used to get around the property without putting weight on his ailing back. (See André the Giant's Pain Management on Set.) André offered Elwes a turn driving it.¹

"I had been on motorcycles. I figured a four-wheeler would be easier. Andre said: 'Don't go too fast.' Naturally I went too fast. I hit a rock at speed and the ATV came down on my left foot. I knew immediately that I had broken something." — Cary Elwes, As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride (2014) (book, not available online)

The big toe was fractured. Elwes hid the injury initially because he was twenty-four, in his first major lead role, and convinced he would be replaced if the production found out. He sat through the rest of that day's shooting in pain, returned to his hotel, and treated the foot himself with ice and a wrapped bandage. By the next morning the foot was visibly swollen.²

How the production handled it

Reiner found out the next day. The production had a small medical setup on location and the on-set physician confirmed the fracture. The production's options were three: replace Elwes (logistically impossible at that point in the schedule and budget), shut down for several weeks while the toe healed (financially impossible), or work around it. They chose the third.³

"We made him an orthopedic boot for the foot and changed the shooting schedule to put the dialogue scenes first. By the time we got back to the action stuff he could mostly walk. Mostly." — Rob Reiner, Vanity Fair (2012)

The boot is invisible in the film because Elwes is mostly in tall pirate boots that hide it. The careful re-blocking of certain action moments was less invisible: Elwes has pointed out, on the 25th-anniversary commentary track, the moments where he favors his right foot in shots that would otherwise have called for him to land on his left.⁴

The shots that show it

Three sequences are most visibly affected:

The R.O.U.S. wrestling scene in the Fire Swamp: Elwes is on the ground for most of the choreography, which was useful for the foot but required additional rigging of the rodent suit performer to put him in close enough quarters for the camera. The sequence was originally scripted with more standing-and-running movement that was cut for time and feasibility.^b18

The torture chamber recovery at b32–33: Westley wakes in the Pit of Despair, then is wheelbarrowed by Fezzik to Miracle Max. The wheelbarrow stage of the recovery sequence is partly an in-fiction device (Westley is mostly dead) and partly a production accommodation (Elwes was still favoring the foot). Elwes has said he is grateful the script gave him several minutes of screen time during which the character was supposed to be barely moving.⁵

The bedroom rescue at b38: Elwes runs in heeled pirate boots, which mostly worked, except for the moment where he's supposed to vault off a low wall. He stepped down instead. The cut is visible in the final film if you know to look for it.^b38

Elwes's memoir treatment

Elwes wrote the toe-injury chapter of As You Wish as a kind of confession, with credit to André for the gesture of letting him try the ATV and to Reiner for not firing him over the resulting damage. The chapter is one of the memoir's most-cited and was excerpted in Vanity Fair in October 2014.⁶

"I was a kid. I made a kid mistake. The crew covered for me. The director rebuilt the schedule for me. Andre felt guilty about it for the rest of his life and would not stop apologizing. The whole production was kinder to me than I deserved." — Cary Elwes, Vanity Fair (2014)

Why the anecdote matters

The toe-injury story is one of the canonical Princess Bride production anecdotes — the kind of bounded production story (André's pain management, Mandy Patinkin's father grief on the duel scene, Rob Reiner laughing audibly through every wrestling take) that the film's cult audience has internalized as part of the larger story. The anecdote stands for something larger about the production: the cast and crew were unusually close, unusually protective of each other, and unusually willing to absorb the costs of one another's mistakes. Several reviewers have argued that the on-set warmth is visible on the screen — that the romance and the friendship in the film read as real because the people performing them genuinely liked each other.⁷

"The toe story is the Princess Bride set in microcosm. Cary screws up. André feels terrible. Rob fixes it. Nobody gets fired. The work goes on. That's the whole production in one anecdote." — Mark Harris, Grantland (2012, archived)