Robin Williams’ Jumanji Co-Star Shared Emotional Stories About The Actor – And His Memorable Advice
If you grew up in the ’90s, you were a Robin Williams fan, there was no two ways about it. He was in so many classic childhood films: Mrs. Doubtfire, Jumanji and Aladdin among others. And his young costars cared about him just as much as his audience did, as this story from the set of Jumanji proves.
There’s a famous Hollywood saying that goes, “Never work with children or animals.” Well, Jumanji had both. It wasn’t an easy movie to make. CGI existed at the time the movie was made, but it wasn’t fine-tuned the way it is now. So lots of the special effects were made with machines or puppets.
But the scenes that did use CGI were very hard to shoot. Williams is on record as saying he found it difficult doing those parts of the movie, and he wasn’t the only one. It all paid off in the end – for years, untrue rumors persisted that a real animal had been killed on the set – but it wasn’t easy.
And there were times when the grueling filming schedule became frustrating. During an interview with the Jumanji cast for the New York Times newspaper in 2017, actor Jonathan Hyde admitted, “It was a strange shoot. We were in Vancouver through the winter. It’s a wet, cold city. For five months, that became a bit of a drag.”
It would probably have been even more of a drag if Robin Williams hadn’t been there, but he very nearly wasn’t. When originally given the script for the movie, he said no. But the studio wouldn’t go ahead without him. The writers frantically retooled the script and presented him with the new version, and that time he said yes.
