When you’re in the business of making people laugh, you never know what kind of effect your work will have on people. That’s especially true when the crowds you’re reaching include folks who have ties to organized crime. Milton Berle once made a wisecrack about a mobster’s wife and wound up getting stabbed with a fork because of it. Rob Reiner was much luckier when he had his short brush with the Mafia, but never forgot his chilling encounter with one high-ranking wiseguy’s right-hand man.
Some time after The Princess Bride was released in 1987, Reiner went out to dinner in Little Italy with When Harry Met Sally… writer Nora Ephron and her husband, Nicholas Pileggi, the author of the book that Goodfellas was based on. The couple deliberately took Reiner to a restaurant they knew John Gotti frequently visited. Reiner was excited at the possibility of seeing the famous mobster in person, and as luck would have it, at around 8 p.m. that evening, Gotti came walking in with a group of henchmen.
The crew sat down and each party ate their respective meals without any words being exchanged—inside, anyhow. Upon exiting the restaurant afterward, Reiner spotted Gotti’s limo being guarded by a large man who resembled Luca Brasi (the character portrayed by Lenny Montana in The Godfather). The unnamed man took one look at Reiner and reportedly told him, “You killed my father. Prepare to die!” “I almost went,” Reiner joked while reflecting on the incident during a 2013 screening of The Princess Bride.
You see, as it turns out, Gotti’s henchman wasn’t threatening Reiner; he was just quoting Mandy Patinkin’s famous line from the film. In a thick Italian accent, the stranger told Reiner, “I seen The Princess Bride. Great movie.” “I thought he was gonna kill me!” Reiner said in an interview with the American Film Institute years later. You can check out the scene the man was referring to below.
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