Facts We Just Learned About Robin Williams That Made Us Say 'Really?'

As Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone was going into production, Robin Williams was eager to play the role of Hagrid - the kindly, half-giant groundskeeper of Hogwarts. Unfortunately, the producers had imposed a "Brits-only" rule for the casting.

Casting director Janet Hirshenson told the Huffington Post, “Robin had called because he really wanted to be in the movie, but it was a British-only edict, and once [director Chris Columbus] said no to Robin, he wasn’t going to say yes to anybody else, that’s for sure. It couldn’t be.”

In the 1990s, Robin Williams was making about $8 million per film. That wasn't the case on Disney's Aladdin. The high-profile comedian and actor agreed to work for scale ($75,000), on the condition that Disney not use him prominently in marketing the 1992 animated feature. As Williams told the Today Show:

We had a deal.... The one thing I said was I will do the voice. I'm doing it basically because I want to be part of this animation tradition. I want something for my children. One deal is, I just don't want to sell anything — as in Burger King, as in toys, as in stuff.

But Disney did use Williams and his character in its advertising - and the film ultimately pulled in more than $500 million worldwide. Williams was salty about the experience, and gave several interviews badmouthing Disney for reneging on their deal. "[T]hey crossed the line," he said. However, Disney representatives argued that all their marketing was approved by Williams and his wife.

Whatever the case, Disney hoped to smooth things over by sending Williams a painting by Pablo Picasso worth about $1 million. Williams's friend Eric Idle, a member of Monty Python, told Williams he should "burn the Picasso live as a form of protest."

Disney and Williams did eventually patch things up, and the actor returned to the Aladdin franchise to voice the genie in 1996's Aladdin and the King of Thieves.

To many comedians, stealing a signature joke is the ultimate sin of stand-up. In the comedy community, Robin Williams was alleged to be a prolific stealer of jokes - but comedians differ on how intentional this was.

Some claim Williams would go to comedy clubs to deliberately steal other comics' material, while others say Williams soaked up comedy bits like a sponge and would repeat them while going on improvisational tangents. Williams himself admitted to the latter in a 2010 interview with Marc Maron:

I think in the old days... if you hang out in comedy clubs, when I was doing it almost 24/7, you hear things, and then if you're improvising all of a sudden you repeat it and go, "Oh s***..." My brain was working that way.

Williams also admitted that, when comedians confronted him about stealing their jokes, he apologized by paying for them. "I was also like the bank of comedy," he told Maron. "Like, 'Oh s***, here you go, here's money, I'm sorry!"

Schindler's List is a heartbreaking film about a monstrous era in world history, and the production took an emotional toll on director Steven Spielberg. In 2018, the director revealed that he and Williams had a weekly phone call that helped him relax:

Robin knew what I was going through, and once a week, Robin would call me on schedule and he would do 15 minutes of stand-up on the phone. I would laugh hysterically, because I had to release so much.

When actor Christopher Reeve was paralyzed during a horse riding accident in 1995, Williams was the first person to show up at his bedside. The two had been students at Juilliard in the 1970s, and remained good friends in the ensuing decades.

While Reeve was waiting for a risky surgical procedure to reattach his skull and spine, Williams appeared in medical scrubs pretending to be Reeve's proctologist. Despite the Russian accent Williams used, it didn't take long for Reeve to figure out the prank. "He came here one afternoon and just — thank God I wear a seatbelt in this chair because I would have fallen out laughing," Reeve said.

Shortly after Williams passed in 2014, Reeve's family released a statement saying, "After our father's accident, Robin's visit to his hospital room was the first time that Dad truly laughed. Dad later said, 'My old friend had helped me know that somehow I was going to be okay.'" 

According to director Bill Kroyer, Disney was annoyed when he poached some of their best animators to make 1992's FernGully: The Last Rainforest. However, he believes what really upset Disney studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg was the fact that Robin Williams was voicing the character of Batty Koda.

At the time, Williams was also lending his voice to the genie in Aladdin, and both films were slated to debut in the same year. Katzenberg didn't like that, but Williams had signed up to do FernGully first. According to FernGully screenwriter Jim Cox,

Katzenberg did not want him voicing two animated characters in two animated movies at the same time, and tried to force Robin not to do it. Robin was steaming, like, "It's my voice! You can't stop me."