John Corbett: the Big Fat Greek husband Nia Vardalos went to the ends of the earth to find
FOURTEEN years after they first fell in movie love, Nia Vardalos and John Corbett look back on why he was her perfect groom and how he almost missed out on the role.
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NIA Vardalos needed a man. A man who’d be happy on a set filled with forceful women. A man up for being ‘baptised’ in an inflatable pool in front of overbearing in-laws. A man who could handle her Big Fat Greek Wedding.
But all the first-time writer/leading lady was getting was men playing that baptism scene “with anger”.
“The real Ian got baptised without anger,” she points out, “he just saw it as a fun compromise.”
The search to cast a groom was getting desperate until, two weeks before cameras were to roll on My Big Fat Greek Wedding in 2001, Vardalos and producer Gary Goetzman had a serendipitous run-in with John Corbett — then most famous for playing Chris the DJ in ’90s TV series Northern Exposure — in a Toronto hotel bar.
“John turned around and had such kindness in his eyes, I was like: He is the one!” Vardalos recalls. “And I was not wrong. He’s still one of my closest friends.”
Corbett was in Toronto shooting Serendipity. With production on the two films overlapping, for two weeks Corbett would “work on Serendipity for 12 hours then, when everyone else went home, I’d get in a van and go to the set of Big Fat Greek Wedding which was just starting for 12 hours.
“That drove me a little bit insane,” he admits.
But even at the time, says the actor in his instantly recognisable drawl, “it was worth it”.
As years passed following the incredible success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Corbett all but gave up on a sequel.
“Ten years in I thought people had probably lost interest and if we did do another one, God, we’re gonna seem desperate ...”
Yet when Vardalos finally got the family back together to make My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, even Corbett was chuffed with how it turned out.
“For me it just works. Everybody looked great. The script was great. We had enough laughs ... We did a pretty good job for all these years later.”
In the sequel, Toula and Ian are now the tired parents of a teenager who finds her Greek family mortifying.
Vardalos insisted on wearing no make-up in the movie’s opening stages. Did she make-under Corbett to get him looking tired, too?
“No, I just showed up at work,” the 54-year-old laughs.
So much did Corbett love coming back, he wanted to take a piece of the sequel home. His late-night souvenir hunting was immortalised in a photo tweeted by Vardalos.
“We’d shot our last scene on the Dancing Zorbas restaurant set, so I snuck back in because I knew they’d tear it down in the morning,” Corbett recalls. “I was looking for something to steal and I heard a rattling coming from the kitchen area ... There was Nia trying to take a picture off the wall.
“So she helped me steal a souvenir, then she pulled her phone out — this is about 2 in the morning — and said, ‘Hey, let’s capture the moment’. For some reason I said, ‘Let me take my shirt off!’”
The body seen in that picture, he adds, can only be sustained “for about 10 seconds”.
The reason Corbett responded differently than other men to Vardalos’s story all those years ago lies in his West Virginia upbringing.
“I didn’t have a father growing up; he split when I was about two. So I was raised by two strong women who thought I was the funniest and cutest kid in the world: my mum Sandy, and her mother, who was a Great Russian Jewish woman named Eldoris,” he explains.
“We didn’t have much money, but my mum bought me my guitar and all my arts and crafts pens and paints. And she always encouraged me.”
As it turned out, 2002 was a big year for Corbett. Not only did he witness My Big Fat Greek Wedding go bonkers at the box office — “I remember when it made $5 million, we all went berserk ...” — it was the year he met his partner, actor and iconic sex symbol Bo Derek.
“We had to stop dating,” Corbett recalls with a laugh, “because I had to go out and promote the movie!”
Is Bo OK with Corbett and Vardalos (who also teamed up in 2009’s I Hate Valentine’s Day) snogging on screen every few years?
“Boy I hope so!” Corbett laughs. “I mean, she’s been on the cover of five Playboy magazines, I think she can handle seeing me kiss some other guy’s wife for a few minutes. For over a decade now I’ve had to see guys constantly hand her Playboys and ask her to sign them.”
Corbett is currently filming season two of Denis Leary’s FX comedy Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll with what he calls “my new New York family”.
An actor who lives for the experience, not the end result, Corbett reckons his habit of falling into much-loved roles — from Northern Exposure’s Chris to Carrie’s boyfriend Aidan in Sex and the City — is not of his own doing.
“I don’t have any other way to put it: it’s a stroke of luck,” he says. “I had Sex and the City luck. I had a cool role on Parenthood that was luck. My Big Fat Greek Wedding ... it’s just luck, man. I don’t go searching, they just fall into my lap.”
As for a third Wedding, he doesn’t want to rush Vardalos.
“I want No.3 to be as good as No.2 is,” Corbett says. “But once the dust settles on this one, I reckon Nia might take a good hard look at it. I hope so; just out of sheer selfishness and greed, I want another one.”
MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING 2 OPENS THURSDAY
Originally published as John Corbett: the Big Fat Greek husband Nia Vardalos went to the ends of the earth to find
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