Nia Vardalos will move on from My Big Fat Greek Wedding the way a mobster leaves the Mafia. It will never quite happen.
As the writer and star of the second-most successful independent movie ever - $230 million gross and counting (behind only The Passion of the Christ) - Vardalos will gladly deal with being one of the few in Hollywood to capture lightning in a bottle. She does not hesitate to refer to the film, even while she's promoting her new movie, Connie and Carla, which opens Friday.
Asked when the hubbub eased, she replies, "It hasn't. I took two weeks off this summer. It was supposed to be two months. I rented a beach house. ... I just tried to be free and just think, absorb what happened. And in increments, I've actually had a bit of perspective on it."
The aftermath was not all a big, fat success. My Big Fat Greek Life, the TV spinoff starring Vardalos, did not last a season. And the surprisingly huge profits from the film triggered not-so-unexpected lawsuits by those seeking a bigger slice of the pie.
Still, a $5 million independent movie has probably never bought a writer-actress so much influence in the major-studio world. Universal did not change a word of Connie and Carla, Vardalos says.
Vardalos and Toni Collette play dinner-theater chanteuses who run afoul of the Russian mob in Chicago and hightail it to Los Angeles. They continue their singing careers by pretending to be drag queens in a West Hollywood stage bar.
Vardalos, a 41-year-old Winnipeg, Manitoba, native who's a veteran of Toronto and Chicago's Second City comedy troupe, has always loved dinner theater. She learned about the gay scene for the film.
"I hope the audience from My Big Fat Greek Wedding knows I respect them too much to write the same movie twice," she says. "It's the same family values; it's the same acceptance of people who're different than us. The first time was Greek; the second time is drag queens. Pursue your dreams. You only have one life."
Rita Wilson and husband, Tom Hanks, are again her producers. When they got involved in the first film, they generated a tale of Hollywood kismet that will be retold as if it were a fairy tale.
After reading an article on Vardalos' one-woman show about her Greek family and her marriage to a non-Greek, Wilson, also Greek and married to a non-Greek, checked out Vardalos' performance one night. The two met afterward, and Wilson remarked that it would make a fun movie. Vardalos shoved her finished script into Wilson's hand.
