It has been almost 12 years since the death of Robin Williams shook the entertainment world – and this week would have been the actor’s 75th birthday.
Since the actor’s death in 2014, anecdotes about his many good deeds have continued to surface, including from Jumanji child star Bradley Pierce, who revealed how the actor stepped in to defend him from over-demanding producers.
Alongside Kirsten Dunst, Pierce played one of the kids in the 1995 family film. In 2020, he recalled shooting a sequence in which the titular game leads to a fierce monsoon.
The actor, who was 13 at the time, was having trouble breathing in the scene due to the water and his extensive makeup. In the film, his character is transformed into a monkey.
“I couldn’t breathe through my nose,” he told CBCListen, adding that the shoot, which lasted for eight days, “was really draining for everybody” and left him “tired”.
Despite this, Pierce recalled that producers attempted to get the child stars to work overtime, which is not legally permitted.
“Children can only be on set for a number of hours,” Pierce said. “The producers had approached our parents and said, ‘Is there any way we can do a bit of overtime to get it done?’
“That’s not uncommon at all in the industry because it literally saves $100,000 (£73,000) plus to do that extra half hour rather than a whole day.”
Bradley Pierce’s character turns into a monkey in ‘Jumanji’ (Sony Pictures Releasing)
Williams, however, “caught wind of these conversations” and “pulled the director [Joe Johnston] and producers aside” to tell them that wouldn’t be happening.
“He said, ‘No, we are not doing any extra time. You’re going to let everybody out now and we’re going to come back next week,’” recalled Pierce.
He added: “For all the dollars that would have cost, nobody would have stood up the way he did. In addition to being warm, generous and kind, he was also very protective.” The Independent has contacted Johnston for comment.
Robin Williams in ‘Jumanji’ (Sony Pictures Releasing)
Jumanji – which also starred Bonnie Hunt and Jonathan Hyde – is one of Williams’s most popular films. The movie follows two children whose worlds collide with Williams’s Alan Parrish, who was sucked into the magical board game as a young boy.
While the film is more than 30 years old, and spawned a reboot starring Dwayne Johnson in 2017, the majority of its fans still don’t know what the title means.
According to Chris van Allsburg, the author who wrote the 1981 children’s book that inspired the film, Jumanji is actually a Zulu word for “many effects”.
These “effects” refer to “the exciting consequences of the game”, which includes the unleashing of wild monkeys, untamed tigers and huge spiders into the world.
Williams very nearly didn’t star in the film, only agreeing to sign on once the original script had been redrafted. Meanwhile, as well as Jumanji, Pierce also voiced Chip in Beauty and the Beast (1992) and appeared in 1997 film The Borrowers.
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