In 2002, Nia Vardalos, a relatively unknown Greek-Canadian actor, wrote and starred in a $5 million comedy with little by way of fanfare. Within weeks, My Big Fat Greek Wedding – a Cinderella tale about a Greek-American finding self-esteem and love despite her omnipresent, extended family – had leapfrogged The Blair Witch Project to become the most successful independent movie of all time. The film ultimately bagged $368.7 million at the box office and an Academy Award nomination for Vardalos.
“I thought I was writing about my family,” smiles Vardalos. “But when the film was released globally, I discovered I was writing about your family. I went to Japan, women came up bowing to me, saying: ‘I am Toula’. And I thought, wow. We’re all struggling to understand the boundaries within our own families. They come with love. But they need testing sometimes.”
Nobody saw those numbers coming, but the producers – Tom Hanks, his wife Rita Wilson, and regular producing partner Gary Goetzman – knew there was something in the screenplay.
Vardalos, who translated her screenplay into a one-woman show when nobody would read her script, recalls the first time someone did: “The first time I met Tom – Mr Big as I call him – he gave notes on the script, then packed up his things and said: ‘I have to go, it’s my day for carpool’. That sums them up. They set a standard for me. They treated me like gold before the movie made a dime. I expected that would happen in subsequent movies but sometimes there’s a lack of decency in Hollywood. So I keep going back.”
Vardalos has subsequently co-written Larry Crowne with Hanks. And having played fairy godparents to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Hanks and Wilson became actual godparents to Vardalos' daughter Ilaria.
Motherhood was a long-time coming for Vardalos. She and her husband, the actor Ian Gomez, spent more than a decade trying both alternative medicines and 13 failed attempts at IVF before turning to adoption. Vardalos chronicled the experience of adopting from the American foster care system in the 2013 book, Instant Mom.
The experience would also prove an unlikely springboard for My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2.
“Even my own family are asking, ‘why now?’” laughs the 53-year-old. “The simple answer is that the producers immediately asked me to do a sequel after the first movie. But I was going through a private struggle to become a mother. Then suddenly, very instantly, I became a mom. My daughter was almost three years old. And the reason the new film exists is because on my daughter’s first day of kindergarten, I was crying so hard at leaving her. Another mom – in an effort to comfort me – said: ‘Don’t feel bad. In another 13 years, they’ll have to go to college.’ And I felt such panic.’
“There was no denying that I had morphed into my own suffocating parents. So I set out that day to write, knowing it’s not ‘Do we become our parents?’ It’s ‘when do we become our parents?’”
All grown up
Thus, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 sees married Toula (Vardalos) and Ian (John Corbett) fretting over their eye-rolling teenage daughter Paris (Elena Kampouris) as she considers colleges. Meanwhile, during a genealogical search, Toula's parents discover that their marriage was never formally registered, thereby necessitating more big fat nuptials.
As with the original, second-generation stereotypes are rendered with fondness and warmth. Indeed, even if you are feeling like a thuggish cynic, about five minutes with Nia Vardalos ought to do the trick. She’s genuinely well-disposed to everything. She loves Dublin. She loves Kilkenny, where, during the comedy festival, she ate chips off a truck at 2am and it was “the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten in my life”.
She even has nice things to say about Vodafone outlets as they allowed her to map her way around London when she was filming the US version of The Great British Bake Off. She loves that the only other Winnipeggian I've interviewed is arthouse auteur Guy Maddin: "Oh my God!" she cries. "I'm so honoured to be in that company! He's so fantastic." She's self-deprecating, saying: "I'm the least funny person in my family; but I'm the only one that gets paid for it. I'm so lucky."
Was she worried about revisiting her much-loved original? Belated sequels – see Blues Brothers 2000, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Godfather Part III – do not always end well.
“Oh no. I describe myself as a fearless idiot. I don’t think about pressure at all. A woman mining coal: that’s pressure. A woman going off into space: that’s pressure. What I have is opportunities. I was careful because I have the same team and the same cast around me. With the new teen cast, it was almost like looking into their eyes to see if there was goodness there. They had to fit. . We can have differences of opinion. We need disagreements for better creativity. But if those disagreements come from a place of respect, that will yield a better result. People are funnier when they are comfortable.”
Her mom still checks over her writing for traces of mean-spiritedness. But her family are well-disposed to both films.
“My aunt that actually does have that lump on the back of her neck. When I gave my mom the first screenplay I asked her if I should change the name. And mom said: are you kidding me? And sure enough Voula walks around introduced herself as the real Voula and showing the scar where her twin was removed.”
Nowadays, Vardalos and her mother have something else to bond over worry.
“My daughter is almost 11 so all I do is worry about puberty and boys and potentially dangerous situations at schools. I’m off doing this press tour right now and my mother keeps calling to ask: ‘Are you getting enough sleep?’ ”
