Perlman Spat in Connery's Face 16 Times for Name of the Rose — SkimNews
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- Jean-Jacques Annaud drove author Umberto Eco to Charles de Gaulle airport and quizzed him on details like monks' shoes and pig colors, then hired medievalist Jacques Le Goff and seven colleagues to ensure historical accuracy on costumes, architecture, and liturgy.
- Sean Connery personally knocked on Annaud's door with the screenplay under his arm, offering to play William of Baskerville after agent Mike Ovitz had repeatedly lobbied for the casting.
- Christian Slater, then 16, arrived drunk to audition for the novice Adso without learning his lines; Annaud cast him anyway and later discovered Slater was the casting director's son.
- During the climactic library fire scene, Feodor Chaliapin Jr was knocked to the ground by a falling timber beam, then asked from the floor at age 80: "I'm 80 years old, I don't mind dying. Was the take good?"
- Producer Bernd Eichinger secretly sold Annaud's Munich production office building without telling him to help fund the film, surprising the director after four months of shooting in Rome.
- Ron Perlman spent 13+ hours in the makeup chair once for the prosthetic hump with his head shaved to look mangy, then had to spit in Connery's face 16 times in a single day after Connery told him: "if you don't actually spit in my face, we'll be here all fucking day."
Why it matters: First-person accounts from Annaud and Perlman reveal how a now-canonical 1986 mystery adaptation nearly collapsed repeatedly on set — Connery's cowl caught fire, a timber beam injured Chaliapin, and producer Eichinger covertly sold the production office to keep it afloat. The 16-spit anecdote captures the working trust between Perlman and Connery that turned a single uncomfortable gag into one of the film's most memorable dynamics.
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