The casting battle between Liam Neeson and Andre the Giant: “He got the right guy”
At six feet and four inches, Liam Neeson is tall for an actor, but he’s nowhere close to being Andre the Giant tall, which makes it equal parts bizarre and fascinating they were once in the running for the very same role.
Whenever the professional wrestler would swap the squared circle for the silver screen, the casting was always based on his proportions. After all, Andre was an entire foot taller than Neeson and tipped the scales at a billed weight north of 500 pounds. He was a beefy bloke, and that’s why he was hired.
He played a sasquatch in Lee Majors’ The Six Million Dollar Man because he was huge, he played the monster Dagoth in Conan the Destroyer because he was huge and made Arnold Schwarzenegger look tiny by comparison, and in his final film credit, he played a circus giant in the posthumously-released Trading Mom because he was huge.
Neeson, meanwhile, was very rarely cast exclusively because he was a tall fellow. He was a thespian first and foremost, who just so happened to be more in danger of bumping his head on a low ceiling than the average actor. He and Andre were a million miles apart in every respect, so there was only ever going to be one winner in the battle between them.
When director Rob Reiner was piecing together what would eventually become beloved fantasy favourite The Princess Bride, he was in need of a giant. As chance would have it, Andre neatly fit the bill. Author and screenwriter William Goldman had always envisioned Hulk Hogan’s former arch-nemesis for the part because he was incredibly tall and just as bulky.
His second choice was Schwarzenegger, and he could have been in line to play Fezzik in another timeline. For a while, it looked as though Andre’s commitments to the global touring schedule of the WWF would eliminate him from contention, but by the time The Princess Bride gained momentum in pre-production, the ‘Austrian Oak’ was already a star thanks to Conan and the Terminator, so he was out of their price range.
However, there was a dark horse contender, or at least he thought so. Neeson revealed to Rolling Stone that he auditioned for Fezzik, but Reiner quickly shut him down for reasons that should have been obvious, looking at who ended up playing the character in the movie.
“I was out in LA with my then-English agent and she said, ‘Oh, this film’s going to happen, this part’s a giant, and the director is coming to London to meet actors.’ So I’m back in London and going to meet Rob Reiner at a hotel. I went up, knocked on the door, and Rob was behind a desk with the casting director,” Neeson recalled. “He looked at me, looked at her, looked at me, looked at her, and shouted, ‘I need a giant! What height are you?’ I said, ‘Six-foot-four’. And he goes, ‘I need a giant! You’re not a giant!’ He never even said hello.”
A giant he was not, with Neeson admitting “he got the right guy” in the end when his lack of epic proportions worked against him. He was out of the running, a gap in Andre’s availability opened up thanks to the cancellation of a planned match in Tokyo, and The Princess Bride had its Fezzik.
