The first thing everyone remembers is the door.

André René Roussimoff couldn’t enter a room without bowing to it, bending his massive frame as if apologizing for existing.

When he straightened to his full height, the air itself seemed to change.

Seven feet four inches.

Over five hundred pounds.

A body shaped by gigantism and acromegaly, conditions that gave him his size but stole his comfort, his longevity, and eventually his life.

To the world, he was a spectacle.

To the cast of The Princess Bride, he was something else entirely.

Robin Wright remembers the cold before she remembers anything else.

England’s rain cut through her thin Buttercup dress, the damp wind biting into her bones as she shivered between takes.

Then André approached her without a word.

No announcement.

No joke.

Just presence.

He placed his enormous hand gently on top of her head.

It covered her skull like a helmet, his fingers trailing down the back of her neck.

Heat poured into her.

André was always warm, always sweating, his body generating an almost unnatural warmth.

Robin later said it felt like someone had dropped a small sun onto her head.

It wasn’t theatrical.

It wasn’t funny.

It was instinctive kindness.

That was André.

A man capable of crushing bones without effort who lived his life as if terrified of hurting anyone.

Everyone tells the same story in different words.

Gentle.

Sweet.

Intelligent.

Thoughtful.

Rob Reiner said André didn’t need direction; he understood space, presence, timing.

Wrestling had taught him how to communicate without words.

He moved like someone acutely aware of how much room he occupied and how careful he had to be with it.

And yet, despite being perfect for Fezzik, André never believed he deserved the role.

His English worried him.

His accent embarrassed him.

During his audition, Rob Reiner couldn’t understand a word he said.

So Reiner recorded every one of André’s lines onto a cassette tape, speaking them exactly as he wanted them delivered.

André memorized the entire script by sound, playing the tape over and over until the language bent to him.

He didn’t just perform Fezzik.

He earned him.

What the audience never saw was the pain.

By the time filming began, André had already undergone major back surgery.

Walking hurt.

Standing hurt.

Existing hurt.

The stunts were illusions.

When Fezzik carries Westley, they aren’t really moving that way—hidden ramps and careful framing made the impossible seem effortless.

When Buttercup leaps into his arms, she’s lowered gently by wires.

André couldn’t lift her.

And it devastated him.

He hated disappointing people.

Yet he never complained.

Not once.

Christopher Guest shook André’s hand every single morning just to feel it again, his own hand disappearing into a palm the size of a catcher’s mitt.

Carrie Elwes remembers André entering a room and feeling something shift—like the laws of scale no longer applied.

But André didn’t want awe.

He didn’t want fear.

He once told Billy Crystal that he loved living on his farm because animals didn’t stare at him.

They didn’t whisper.

They just saw him.

That longing followed him everywhere.

On set, André finally found peace.

Mandy Patinkin recalled André saying he loved working on The Princess Bride because nobody looked at him.

Nobody treated him like a sideshow.

Nobody turned him into a spectacle.

He was just André.

A castmate.

A friend.

Family.

There were moments of pure comedy, of course.

Legendary moments.

Like the time André drank too much wine and passed out in the lobby of the Dorchester Hotel, his massive body stretched across the floor like a fallen monument while confused guests stared.

Or the time his bar tab reached $40,000 because he drank beer by the pitcher like it was a glass of water.

Or the infamous 16-second fart so powerful it stopped production entirely.

The crew froze.

Tools dropped.

The set trembled.

Rob Reiner gently asked if he was okay.

André wiped tears of laughter from his eyes and said, “I am now, boss.”

But beneath the laughter was sadness André never tried to hide.

He knew big people didn’t live long.

He accepted it with a quiet wisdom that softened him rather than hardened him.

Carrie Elwes said André understood time was short, and it made him cherish people more deeply.

He held the weight of his own fate while lifting everyone else’s spirits.

Even the outside world had to adjust to him.

Police once followed him not to arrest him, but to protect him—from lawsuits, from misunderstandings, from accidents caused simply by his size.

He carried that burden everywhere.

Except on set.

On The Princess Bride, André belonged.

When he died in 1993 at just 46 years old, the grief rippled far beyond wrestling fans.

It hit the people who had felt his warmth on freezing days, who had laughed with him until their sides hurt, who had been held—literally and emotionally—by a man too large for the world but somehow perfect within it.

The truth is, The Princess Bride would still be a beloved film without André the Giant.

But it would not be the same.

And neither would the people who made it.

Ask the cast who André really was, and they won’t tell you about the legend.

They’ll tell you about his hand on their head, his shy smile, his booming laughter, his gentleness, and the way he made everyone feel safe simply by standing nearby.

He wasn’t just Fezzik.

He was the heart of the story.

And even now, decades later, that giant hand still rests softly on their lives.