Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn Helped Make ‘Wedding Crashers’ Comedy Gold by Tweaking Script

Wedding Crashers crashed the record books — the 2005 laugh riot became the first R-rated comedy to break the $200 million mark at the box office.

The David Dobkin–directed farce stars Owen Wilson (John Beckwith) and Vince Vaughn (Jeremy Grey) as two Washington, D.C., womanizers who like to sneak into strangers’ weddings to take advantage of the romance in the air to pick up gals for one-night stands. The promiscuous pair crash the wedding of the eldest daughter of U.S. Treasury Secretary William Cleary (Christopher Walken) and Kathleen Cleary (Jane Seymour) with their sex-seeking sights set on their younger daughters, Claire (Rachel McAdams) and Gloria (Isla Fisher). Bradley Cooper plays Claire’s verbally abusive boyfriend, Sack Lodge, who uses a weekend football game to hurt John, who sleeps with Claire. Will Ferrell has an uncredited role as Chazz Reinhold, a wedding and funeral crasher who mentored Jeremy.

The seed of the story sprouted from producer Andrew Panay, who received an invitation to a friend’s wedding and was reminded of his college days when he would crash weddings. His production company hired writers Steve Faber and Bob Fisher to pen the script.

Interning for a congressman while in college, Fisher would crash lobbyist events, recalling to Mel Magazine, “I had zero money and needed to eat. We’d line our pockets with Saran Wrap and leave with our pants stuffed with cold cuts. This shows you the level of how pathetic this all is, because the guys in our film crash weddings for sex. Um, we were crashing for food.”

Dobkin had been searching for a project to unite Vaughn and Wilson, but the other spots didn’t come easy. “I’d seen more than 200 people for [Claire], and the studio [New Line] had called me to meet with them,” he says. “They were going to force me to make a decision, because the casting was going over budget and I couldn’t find the person. The very last person before that meeting was Rachel McAdams. She was the only person that could do the role right.”

And for the first time in decades, Seymour actually had to audition for a role, which had a topless scene! “I know that pretty much every actress my age, and a little bit above, tried out for that part,” remembers the Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman icon. “All stars — it was crazy. I’ve almost never auditioned in my life. I’m absolutely dreadful at it, and I never had to because I somehow ended up starring in things from an early age. When I first read it, I just thought it was hilarious. But I was straight off of Dr. Quinn, and I thought, ‘Oh God, that audience is going to hate me for doing this.’ Then I read it a second time — it was even funnier, specifically the [seduction] scene that I would be doing [in the audition]. And I said, ‘To hell with it, I’m doing it.’”

Harrison Ford and Burt Reynolds were considered to play the treasury secretary, but Dobkin recalls, “I just said, ‘I see Walken,’ because I knew I wouldn’t have to lift a finger to make people scared of him.”

As for the antagonist Sack, “My saying is that you never, ever hire someone in the room — you have to always go back and watch the tape. Bradley Cooper is the only person who was an exception. I couldn’t find anyone, and then he came in the room and he was amazing. He was like a thoroughbred. I remember going up to him and saying, ‘Dude, you’re awesome! You got the part!’”

Fisher was up against the likes of Oscar winner Anna Paquin and Shannon Elizabeth for the role of Gloria, and says, “I just got lucky. Every girl that went in before me was famous.” But casting director Lisa Beach says, “Isla Fisher was the funniest audition ever.”

Wilson and Vaughn weren’t happy with the original script and worked with Faber and Bob Fisher. “When I first read the script, I wasn’t comfortable,” Wilson recalled to New York Magazine. “It was a funny concept and story, but part [of it] felt corny … Vince and I did a lot of work, meeting with writers. It felt like a movie you’ve seen a million times before.”

Vaughn adds that the four of them “went through the entire script, and there wasn’t a scene that we didn’t go through and change.”

There was also a lot of ad-libbing during filming. Wilson made up the cheesy line when he tells a dewy-eyed bridesmaid, “You know how they say we only use 10 percent of our brains? I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts.” In fact, he thought of it well after the scene was shot and Dobkin reshot it later.

Wilson turned into a nervous Nellie in one scene where his character grabs the breast of Seymour’s! Dobkin says star-struck Wilson was a gentleman and shy about touching the former Bond girl. “So to him, even in a movie scene, putting a hand on a breast was so uncomfortable, and it was so funny because Jane was so comfortable,” reveals the director to Variety. “Owen was very stiff in the scene. He didn’t really want to squeeze her breast when she was telling him to. And I was like, ‘Dude, you gotta do it. It doesn’t look right; your hands look like crab claws.’ And then he did it eventually, and that scene ended up being way funnier than I thought it was going to be.”

Wedding Crashers raked in more than $209 million in the U.S., becoming the first R-rated comedy to hit that mark. The total box office was $288.5 million against a $40 million budget.

At one point, a sequel was considered. “Wedding Crashers came out at a time when people weren’t doing lots of sequels,” says Dobkin on Quora. “We did come up with a great take. Vince, Owen and myself sat around at Owen’s house one day and broke the story. It was really, really funny. We wanted Daniel Craig to be the ultimate wedding crasher, with his sexy body and his Speedo, and the two guys would be incredibly threatened by him. He was like the next generation terminator of wedding crashing.”

But it never came to be.