Wallace Shawn The Princess Bride (1987)

Wallace Michael Shawn was born in 1943 in New York, the son of New Yorker editor William Shawn. He was a published playwright (Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Designated Mourner) and translator before he became a recognizable screen face, and he had played the lead opposite André Gregory in Louis Malle's My Dinner with André (1981) — a film that had given him the public presence of a man who talks, fast and intricately, in long sentences. By 1987 his film roles had been mostly comic supporting work (Manhattan, All That Jazz, Atlantic City).

Rob Reiner cast him as Vizzini — the diminutive Sicilian crime boss who runs the kidnap team — for almost exactly the qualities the playwright reputation supplied: a man whose volume of speech is wildly out of proportion to his physical authority.

Shawn was terrified the entire shoot

Shawn has spoken often, with characteristic self-deprecation, about expecting to be fired daily during the shoot. He believed the role had been written for Danny DeVito and that the producers were settling.

"I was terrified the whole time we were filming because I was convinced that I was going to be fired any day, because Danny DeVito was the perfect man to play that part, not me. I was sure they were just waiting for him to be available." — Wallace Shawn, Vanity Fair (2012)

The terror reads in the performance. Vizzini is a man who maintains authority by talking faster than anyone else can think, and when the talking stops working — when the man in black turns out to be at the same intellectual register he is — the panic in Shawn's face is real.^b14

"Inconceivable!"

Vizzini's catchphrase has outlived almost every other line in the film as a quotation — usable in any situation where someone refuses to accept what has just happened. It is the line Inigo eventually answers: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The exchange is one of the most-cited cinema-quote pairs of the 1980s and the seed of The Cult Status (The Princess Bride).

The rest of the career

Shawn's voice has been heard in Toy Story (1995) and its sequels as Rex; he has appeared in every Woody Allen ensemble for two decades; he played Cyrus Rose on Gossip Girl, the hotel concierge in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and Dr. Sturgis on Young Sheldon. He has continued to write plays — political, philosophical, often performed alone — and to translate and stage classical work. He published the long essay collection Essays in 2009 and the political dialogue Night Thoughts in 2017.

"I'm not actually a very good actor. I have a few effects, and I deploy them when called for." — Wallace Shawn, The New York Times (2017)

The line is funny, and it is also wrong. The Vizzini terror is real acting, sustained for an hour of screen time, in a register no other actor in the film attempts.