Caffeinated Clint
Nia Vardalos says that the recently-announced “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” sequel came to fruition after a visit from her parents.
“My parents came to live with us for a month during the winter months, and just watching their dynamic, one night I went, ‘I got it! I got it!’ and just went to my office and finished it,” she tells CTV News.
Varadlos turned in the script for the film – which will again be produced by Tom Hanks’s shingle, Playtone – on co-star John Corbett’s birthday.
“I texted John Corbett and said, ‘Do you feel like kissing me again?’ He was like, ‘I’m in, baby,”‘ she laughed.
The sequel will, says Varadlos, feature a wedding. On the RSVP list? The original clan from “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” – which included Louis Mandylor, Andrea Martin, Michael Constantine, Australia’s Gia Carides, and Varadlos’s real-life hubby Ian Gomez – as well as some surprise guests.
Vardalos has been pressured to write a sequel to her breakthrough hit for years. At the end of the original film, her character is pregnant; in real life, Varadlos was struggling to conceive.
“I was in such a struggle to become a mom that I just couldn’t do it. I just could not do the sequel for the simple reason it would be difficult to write an experience that I was not having. And the American press was so invasive,” she said.
“I thought, ‘I can’t do it,’ and I hid, and did all these other fun movies that I wanted to explore. Now that I am a mom, there is just such a story that I want to tell. And although just like the first one there are things that have been made up, the script for number two is from my real experience.”
