"Leslie walked over to me with his hand in his pocket and asked how I was doing. I began to tell him, but Leslie was looking around making a funny face like he was smelling something. Then I heard this disgusting sound coming from, of all people, Leslie! I didn't know how to react. He couldn't have... could he? He saw the look on my face and started laughing. He took his hand from his pocket and pulled out this gadget that he carried with him all the time... his whoopee cushion.
That prank broke the ice to a friendship I will always cherish. You'd never know he was as old as he was because there was always a kid inside ready to play."
"I am fascinated with her, because... somebody asks a question and I get ready to answer it really boring, and she always says something really funny. I cannot believe the funny bone that she has, and I have loved her since the moment I saw her."
"I’m not a great swimmer. I was in the deep end [of a pool] and he was holding court, and I never laughed so hard - I swallowed a big gulp of water and choked for five minutes. [After I was pulled out] everybody was laughing at me. It was pretty good. They did help me out of the pool. I don’t remember [the joke that made me laugh so hard]. He used to go off on rants. It could be airplanes, bicycles, anything. He was such a clown and I loved him for that."
"Apparently he pulled the director and producers aside and said, "No we're not doing any extra time. You're gonna let everyone out of the pool now and we're going to be come back next week." For all the dollars that would have cost, nobody else could have stood up the way he did. In addition to being warm and generous and kind, he was also very protective of all of us. He told everyone, "We're done today, time to go home.""
"He is one of my comedic heroes. He's inspired my whole career. I've always been friends with him, I love him dearly... But better late than never. The time is right. This was the project... When we would stop filming, we were on the set with like 15 to 1,000 people on the set. When [they] would say cut, you usually don't see Eddie, Eddie's disappeared... gone to the trailer... But I would be sitting in my director's chair and in this sea of people Eddie would gravitate over to me, and me and him would start [conversing] and laughing and making each other laugh."
"It was really a Hollywood fight, a "Don’t touch my face!" kind of thing. Chevy is a big man, I’m not a small guy, and we were separated by my brother Brian [Doyle-Murray], who comes up to my chest. So it was kind of a non-event. It was just the significance of it. It was an Oedipal thing, a rupture. Because we all felt mad he had left us, and somehow I was the anointed avenging angel, who had to speak for everyone. But Chevy and I are friends now. It’s all fine."
"The worst host was Chevy Chase. I don’t know if he was on something, but he was just kind of going around the room and systematically riffing. First it was on the guys, playfully making fun, until, when he got to one of our female writers, he made some reference like, "Maybe you can give me a hand job later." In hindsight, I wish we’d all gotten up and walked out of the room."
"Tom can walk into any room and make you feel like you're in your living room, truly. Make you feel comfortable, make you feel like you have something interesting to contribute, make you feel like there's a reason you're on the planet. And that's a true gift. That isn't acting, and isn't, you know, dinner-party games; it's heart and it's compassion and it's soul. And he has that."
"I almost choked on some kind of vegetable that I shouldn't have been eating: Brussels sprouts! So he had to give me the Heimlich maneuver. He saved my life, and then he asked me to marry him. And I thought... wow, what if that happens again? I should probably marry him."
"Eddie was hardly ever there, which was really sad. He has the best stand-ins you've ever seen. Literally, from 5 feet away, you would think they were Eddie. I think I probably did most of the movie with his stand-ins."
"I loved John dearly... We were very, very close friends. I think I worked with John more than anybody else in TV, and on four or five movies. John was a lovely man, first of all, who cared deeply about people. And he was, I think, one of the most gifted comedic actors that honestly has ever been in the business. He made such an impact in his movies and people truly loved him... It always seems like John is still around. That's how much of an impact he made on your life, you know? You're still kind of waiting for a phone call."
"I'm so nervous acting opposite him. I don't know how we're going to manage this without laughing hysterically at each other. We do not discuss it. I don't even want to rehearse - I'm going to go onstage with a big blinder on my head - I don't know what I'm thinking."
"She knows everyone's lines. She knows my lines and Nicole Kidman's lines and Reese Witherspoon's lines and probably the dog's bark, too. I'm not the same actress after working with Meryl. She's so wonderfully generous and immediately disarms you with her generosity.
You sort of forget for a moment that you're working with a master of her craft. Then the cameras start rolling, and she does the thing, and all of a sudden you go, "Oh god, what am I doing? I've got to get my stuff together.""
"It's a thrill whenever we get together. He has just such a loving, wonderful sense of himself in his situation in time. Really, he just has a perspective, and a sense of humor about it, and a kind of joy. He loves being who is and being able to [show] it. For me, to be involved in this made all of us feel good about what we were doing, and why we were doing it."
"I didn't talk about it for years... Bill just got drunk at dinner. He was an Irish drunken bully, is what he was. He came back from dinner [one night] and I said, "Read this [script tweak], I think it's really funny."
And he put his face next to me, nose-to-nose. And he screamed at the top of his lungs, "Everyone hates you! You are tolerated!" He leaned back and he took a modern glass-blown ashtray. He threw it at my face from [only a couple feet away], and it weighed about three-quarters of a pound. And he missed me. He tried to hit me. I got up and left."
"Charlie and I really hit it off. We had a great first few years on that show, it was incredibly smooth, we had a lovely time, it was working really well."
"My first impression of Tom was that he’s funny as hell, up for anything and ready to go, at all times. As I’m sure anybody who’s ever worked with Tom would say, he really is just the nicest, most fun person to be around, with the biggest heart. It’s because he loves acting. He loves to work.
Now, this is weird to admit, but my goal is for people to say, "Geena’s the nicest person I’ve ever worked with." But how the hell are you going to compete with Tom Hanks?"
"It was difficult. I've never been involved in a situation like that where one component is not in the box at all. It was f***in' soul-crushing. I mean, a lot of people are gonna be like, "Oh, you're just trying to blame the movie on him." No, but I had no f***ing help from this dude whatsoever."
"She was so committed to joy and fun and embracing life. She had an Auntie Mame quality to her. I would do crazy things to amuse her on the set. Making her laugh was always a badge of honor.
I remember during Empire we were split up storywise; it was a difficult film to shoot and there was a lot of tension on the set. I was off in the swampland with the puppets and robots, but at least Carrie and Harrison got to work with human beings.
Once at lunchtime she said, “You should try on my jumpsuit.”
I said, “The one-piece white jumpsuit? You’re what, 5’2"? I’ll never get in!”
She said, “Just try.”
I put on that Princess Leia zipper jump suit and it was so tight I looked like a Vegas lounge singer. If that wasn’t ridiculous enough, she had me put on one of those bald cap masks with the Bozo hair and glasses and nose and then she walked me around the back lot."
"[It was] so surreal, honestly. You’re looking at a guy, especially for me, who’s just been bigger than life for my entire existence, you know what I mean? And now he’s sitting in front of me, looking me in my eye, calling me by my name. We’re conversating. We go to the host dinner and all of that, and it’s just like very intimate all of a sudden with one of your greatest, greatest heroes, you know?
And it was incredible. Six days of that. And he just got more and more comfortable with everybody and more open and cracking jokes.
By the time we were doing Thursday promos with Lizzo, he was just all into it. Having a great time and laughing... And it just looked like everybody’s energy was towards him in a positive way, wanting him to have a great show. It was amazing."
"He [Cruise] tries super hard to be a nice person. But the pressure. He takes on a lot. And I think he has this sense that only he can do everything as best as it can be done."
"Lea Thompson was an absolute dream to work with. We still keep in touch to this day."
"Molly...[was a] very reserved [person], and I'm a very outgoing person. That could've worked out great, you know, that dynamic. But it didn't! I think they [Ringwald and other co-stars] were irritated by me from day one."
"Having completely blown up our shooting day, we had to scramble. Then he's unprepared and arrogant! But this is the story I want to share: We shoot him and Jennifer [Aniston] first. Then she walks over to me and says, "Lem, Lem, would you do me a favor and ask him not to put his tongue in my mouth when he's kissing me?" I tell him everything is great but it's a tight shot so maybe let's not do that. Then we're shooting a scene later with Courteney [Cox]. Here comes Courteney walking toward me saying, "Lem, can you please tell him not to put his tongue in my mouth?" I couldn't believe it! I had to tell him again, but a little firmer."
"George [Lucas] likes to cast people that are so close to what he wants he doesn't have to really get in there and give you a lot of direction. So Harrison walks in, and he's just too cool for school. I mean, just instant idolization... We just immediately hit it off. It was perfect. And Harrison had a really firm grasp at... the overview. I think he'd make a really good director if he weren't so lazy."
"He treats his actors like horses because when he did the '60s series Rawhide, the director would shout "Action!' and all the horses bolted. So when he's in charge, he says in a really quiet, soft voice, "All right, go ahead," and instead of shouting "cut!" he says, "That's enough of that." It's intimidating as hell!"
"And we start rehearsing and he came in and was like, “I’m in command. What I say is law.” ...I mean, who the f*ck talks like that? Who comes into rehearsal and says that sh*t? So I started laughing and he slammed me with an aikido elbow against a brick wall and knocked all the air out of me. I dropped to the ground, and all I could say was, “Why? Why?” I really wanted to say that he runs like a b*tch and has no hair, but I was afraid. So on the days when we shot the scene where he died, I showed up so early. I wanted to see him die. It was like a fantasy."
"I was petrified, plus, I'd read that you were six feet tall... When we were all set to start shooting, you tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Oh, by the way, I'm an anti-gun lobbyist, and I can't fire a machine gun."
We went out in the back lot and [I] gave you a .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun, the old mobster kind, and you fired it. I thought, "All right, we're going to be OK.""
"I know Linda tries to play it down, but the reality was, I watched it firsthand, obviously the whole younger team kind of looked up to her and kind of saw her performance... she raised the bar really high [on the earlier movies]... and now raised it even higher... She was a really great motivation on the set."
"I actually was just pleased as punch when I saw him again. It had been a number of years. And I just have this affection for him that is so deep and biting, that just got completely cemented on this film.
I loved working physically with him, I loved seeing him in the trailer, I loved toying with him. You know, it's the very top of a 35-year relationship, and that really means something to me."