Trivia / Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

• Cast the Runner-Up: Originally, the two leads (who appropriately spend the movie mixing up their own names) were cast the other way around.
• Fake Nationality: The main cast are ostensibly Danish given the setting but they are played by British actors.
• Playing Against Type: Gary Oldman and Tim Roth spent much of the 1990s playing hammy villains, so it was a shock for some audiences back then to see them in such a comedy.
• Self-Adaptation: Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation, and ended up directing it as well. Rather than seeking to keep everything the same, he had no hesitation about making substantial changes, adding new bits to take advantage of the new medium and cutting out bits that no longer worked. He said in an interview that part of the reason he took the director's chair was that it "just seemed that I'd be the only person who could treat the play with the necessary disrespect."
• What Could Have Been:
  • John Boorman planned an adaptation in 1968 with Irvin Winkler producing for MGM, who bought the rights for $200,000. He planned for Michael Caine and Terence Stamp to play the leads, Laurence Olivier as the Player King, Albert Finney as Claudius, and Maggie Smith as Gertrude. Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould also wanted to star but MGM never greenlit the movie.
  • Sean Connery was originally cast as the Player King, but he abandoned the film for a bigger paycheck in The Hunt for Red October. Robert Lindsay would have played Rosencrantz.
  • Tim Roth suggested Richard E. Grant for Guildenstern.
  • At one stage, Sting was going to play Hamlet.

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