Trivia / Big Fish

• Acting for Two: Helena Bonham Carter as Jenny Beamen and the Witch.
• The Cast Showoff: When young Edward Bloom is singing in the church and his voice breaks, that single note that we hear is actually Ewan McGregor singing.
• Dueling Movies: With Secondhand Lions, another story about an aging man confronting his mortality while recounting the larger-than-life adventures from his youth to a younger relative, where it's left ambiguous how many of his past escapades actually happened.
• Fake American: Both Edward (played by English Albert Finney and Scottish Ewan McGregor) and Jenny (played by English Helena Bonham Carter). They do it quite well. No Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping here.
• Hide Your Pregnancy: Helena Bonham Carter was pregnant during filming.
• Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: Marion Cotillard originally performed her on-camera lines in English, and would later go on to re-record her lines for the French release.
• Playing Against Type:
  • This movie seems surprisingly bright and cheery for a Tim Burton film.
  • Ewan McGregor had first made a name for himself in the extremely dark Trainspotting as a heroin addict; he then played a dashing romantic lead in Moulin Rouge! and, when Big Fish was made, had settled into being an action hero by playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels. His suddenly playing the mannerly romantic lead in a fantasy family film, then, was something of a surprise.
• Real-Life Relative: Ping and Jing are played by real-life twins Ada and Arlene Tai.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting:
  • Jessica Lange doesn't look much like Alison Lohman◊... now. But she did back in the◊ 'eighties.
  • Same goes for Ewan McGregor and a young Albert Finney◊. The only difference being that McGregor has a cleft chin while Finney doesn't. The resemblance is so uncanny that McGregor himself mistook one of Finney's old photos for a photo of himself.
• Throw It In!: The gag where an elephant poops right next to Edward while he's dreaming blissfully of Sandra? That was unscripted: the elephant started actually defecating during filming, and the crew hurriedly zoomed out to make sure they got the moment in the shot.
• What Could Have Been: Steven Spielberg was attached to this project and wanted Jack Nicholson to star, but dropped out due to his full schedule, soon after which Tim Burton signed on to direct.

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