Robin Hood in ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights’
When Mel Brooks first called me, I assumed it was a prank and hung up on him. I thought it was someone doing a very, very good Mel Brooks impression. I’d never had a filmmaker of that quality call me at home. No one had ever said, “Cary Elwes, I want to work with you” — especially someone like Mel Brooks, who I grew up with and admired and loved to this day. So, when he called, he went, “Hi, this is Mel Brooks.” I said, “Yeah, right,” and hung up on him. He called back and he said, “No, no, no, it really is me! Don’t hang up!” Thank god he was persistent.
He had come to the first screening of The Princess Bride on the Fox lot, and he brought Carl Reiner — Rob’s dad — and he brought Gene Wilder, who was one of my heroes growing up. I mentioned Peter Sellers and the Pythons, but Gene Wilder as far as American comedy was concerned, and Mel Brooks, they’re the end-all and be-all of comedy. To have Mel and Carl and Gene come up to me after that screening and tell me how great I was in it, I could have died and gone to heaven right there. I was like, “This is not real. I’m living a fantasy.” And of course, that’s when Mel got the idea to cast me in Robin Hood, from that movie.
On that first call, he told me, “I’ve got this line for you in the script where you say, ‘I’m the only Robin Hood who can speak with an English accent.’” (Laughs)
I knew what I was signing up for. I’d studied every single Mel Brooks movie, by rote, from The Producers on. His draft of the script didn’t change too much, really — he knew what he wanted. When Things Were Rotten, the TV series, he really wanted to revisit that.