Chris Sarandon The Princess Bride (1987)
Christopher Sarandon was born in 1942 in Beckley, West Virginia, of Greek descent. He trained at the Catholic University of America and worked extensively on the New York stage before his film debut, an Oscar-nominated turn as Leon Shermer — Al Pacino's pre-operative trans wife — in Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975). His film career through the late 1970s and early 1980s included Lipstick (1976), The Sentinel (1977), and Fright Night (1985), in which he played the suave vampire Jerry Dandrige.
Rob Reiner cast him as Prince Humperdinck for almost exactly the qualities the Fright Night role had supplied: a man whose bearing performs decency and whose actual operations are predatory. Humperdinck is the film's most disturbing villain because he is the most plausible — a monarch who books a war the way another man books a wedding.b23
The performance is in the velvet, not the snarl
Sarandon plays Humperdinck almost entirely without raised voice. The bedroom negotiation with Buttercup — the four-ships offer that is also the trap — is delivered in the register of a concerned host.b22 The private conversation with Rugen ("more moving when I strangle her on our wedding night") is delivered with the exhausted competence of a man behind on his to-do list. Even the "to the pain" duel in the bedroom — when Humperdinck believes Westley risen and able-bodied — is played not as cowardice but as accurate threat-assessment.b38
The choice is the performance. A snarling Humperdinck would have made the film a cartoon. Sarandon's deliberately small-scale menace makes Florin a place that could exist.
"The problem with playing a villain is that you can't play him as a villain. He has to think he's right. Humperdinck thinks he's a great prince doing what a great prince should do." — Chris Sarandon, Vanity Fair (2012)
Career around and after
At the time of casting, Sarandon was best known for Dog Day Afternoon, Fright Night, and his first marriage to Susan Sarandon (1967–1979, from whom he kept the professional name). After Princess Bride he provided the speaking voice of Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), a part he has reprised across the Kingdom Hearts video games and a 2024 live concert tour. He continued working in television (Resurrection, The Good Wife, The Resident) and on stage (Cyrano de Bergerac, Long Day's Journey Into Night).
"Humperdinck is the role people want to talk to me about most. More than Dog Day, more than Jack Skellington. People love that movie in a way that doesn't fade." — Chris Sarandon, The A.V. Club (2014)