Trivia / Orphan

• Ability over Appearance: The original script had Esther with platinum blonde hair. Isabelle Fuhrman is dark-haired, but the directors loved her performance so much that they cast her anyway.
• California Doubling: Set somewhere in Connecticut, but filmed in Toronto and Montreal.
• The Cast Show Off: Vera Farmiga is a classically trained pianist, which she gets to demonstrate in the film.
• Disabled Character, Disabled Actor: Aryana Engineer (Max) was born partially deaf in real life.
• Executive Meddling: In the original script, Danny was supposed to die and Esther's backstory (in which she was sexually abused by her father, who she ultimately killed) was supposed to be better explained, making her more sympathetic and her actions of pretending to be a child to seduce John make more sense.
• Fake Russian:
  • Both In-Universe and out. Esther is a 9-year-old Russian orphan pretender, as she's actually a 33-year-old Estonian woman named Leena Klammer. Either way, she's portrayed by American actress Isabelle Fuhrman… who is of Russian-Jewish descent (her mother is an immigrant) but had to learn to speak with an Estonian accent.
  • And Esther's (actually Leena's) Estonian psychiatrist Dr. Värava is played by Karel Roden, a Czech actor who has been cast in various non-Czech Eastern European roles.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: The movie was supposed to take place in the fall, but a record snow fall hitting the filming location during filming changed this to the winter, in turn eliminating a scene in the script at a Halloween carnival at Danny and Esther's school. Some might say the winter atmosphere helped make the movie creepier.
• What Could Have Been: The scene where Esther attempts to seduce John was originally longer and had much crasser dialogue in the original script, including Esther flirtatiously asking John if he would like to spank her.

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