According to director Chris Columbus, it took makeup artists anywhere from 4.5 to 5 hours to transform Robin Williams into the titular English nanny in the 1993 film Mrs. Doubtfire. With that in mind, it’s not hard to understand why Williams was so committed to the character once everything was in place. Columbus told Vanity Fair that Williams did so much improvising as Mrs. Doubtfire that they amassed almost 2 million feet of film by the time they were done shooting. Presumably, that had something to do with him not wanting to reapply the makeup for reshoots later.
Williams’s co-star in the movie, Pierce Brosnan, joked that Williams was in character so much of the time that he only ever really got to work with Mrs. Doubtfire. Williams also apparently got pretty vulgar in his scenes with Brosnan when the child actors weren’t around. Contained within the 2 million feet of film mentioned by Columbus are “reams of footage” in which Brosnan says he ruined takes by laughing at Williams’s improvisation. Williams knew Brosnan was an easy mark and got “quite colorful” while shooting the restaurant scene in the movie, which took them an entire week to finish.
Williams pulled another vulgar gag that unfortunately wasn’t filmed: He walked into a sex shop in San Francisco one night while dressed up as Mrs. Doubtfire. In an interview with Whoopi Goldberg from 2013, Williams said that he tried to buy a double-headed dildo from the store, and specifically asked for a big one without veins. On top of that, he told them he was looking for some scented lube. The joke didn’t last long, and eventually someone recognized him and asked him to leave—supposedly with the lube he requested.
Matthew Lawrence, who played Williams’s son Chris in the movie, said that it wasn’t unusual for Williams to take “experimental walks” around town in between filming. It was important to Williams to test out the believability of the costume on strangers. One day, he took Lawrence along on one of those walks, and not one person they encountered suspected Williams of being anything more than the young boy’s British nanny. We’re gonna go out on a limb and assume that the walk he’s talking about didn’t involve any attempted purchases of dildos or scented lube, however.
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