Bridesmaids: Behind-The-Scenes Facts You Probably Never Knew

This time 15 years ago, some sceptics were seriously still carrying on that tiresome debate about whether a female-led comedy would actually be funny when Bridesmaids arrived on the scene.

Naysayers were more than proven wrong when the comedy came out, and not only made audiences around the world howl with laughter, but became producer Judd Apatow’s highest-grossing film, taking more than £220 million at the box office.

Viewers immediately fell in love with Kristen Wiig’s Annie, a maid of honour who is helping her best friend Lillian, played Maya Rudolph, prepare for her wedding, while also trying to keep a group of unruly bridesmaids (the incomparable Rose Byrne, Melissa McCarthy, Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper) in check.

But it wasn’t just the audiences that were won over by the tale of enduring female friendship (and bodily functions). Bridesmaids was also nominated for the Best Musical Or Comedy prize at the Golden Globes, and even earned two Oscar nods, for Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo’s writing and Melissa McCarthy’s performance.

To mark the movie’s 15th anniversary, the cast (minus Wendy McLendon-Covey, sadly) reunited at the 2026 Academy Awards, giving Bridesmaids fans the world over the urge to rewatch our favourite messy comedy – and sing along to Hold On with Annie and pals.

As many of us revisit the hit movie, we’re taking a peek behind the scenes, and it sounds like it was about as much fun to make as it is to watch.

Here are 23 facts you might not have known about how Bridesmaids came together…

Getting Bridesmaids to the big screen was certainly not a quick and easy task.

The first table read took place in 2007, with Bridesmaids finally appearing on director Paul Feig’s desk five years after he first heard about it. As he put it, the film saved his career.

“In 2010, I was at a low point,” he told Luxury London. “I was directing internet commercials for Macy’s. I was thinking ‘what am I doing with my career?’. Then I got a call out of the blue saying ‘that wedding movie’ is going to happen.”

Paul cites the film as a “game changer” in terms of his filmmaking, because it took him out of movie jail after the commercial failures of I Am David and Unaccompanied Minors.

Producer Judd Apatow wasn’t originally sold on the film’s title, worried it would put off male cinemagoers.

“To get guys in, we were just going to call it Naked Boobs And Guns, but we didn’t have either one of those things, so we changed it,” Kristen joked to Collider. “We actually had a really hard time, trying to think of the title, to be honest. It was hard.”

In fact, it was nearly called Maid Of Honour, until one of the producers’ friends named his own film that title.

It’s almost impossible to imagine anyone else in the role of Melissa McCarthy’s boisterous Megan, but a few different people were also in the frame to take on the character, with Paul Feig even claiming that Megan was the most auditioned-for role in the cast.

Speaking to BuzzFeed in 2012, Busy Phillips revealed she was considered for the role, having previously worked with Judd Apatow on the short-lived show Freaks And Geeks.

“The part wasn’t defined necessarily as one thing [when I auditioned],” she recalled. “I was doing a very specific take on it, and they really liked it. But I think, ultimately, Miss McCarthy is perfect in that movie.”

As well as Busy, Rebel Wilson also auditioned for the part, although she ultimately landed the role of Annie’s roommate, Brynn.

Paul Feig told Glamour in 2020: “[Megan] came in and her take on the character was so different than anyone else that it took me a good 10 seconds to even realise what she was doing.”

In a 2011 interview, Paul admitted he was initially unsure why she was playing the character as a “lesbian” doing “weird sex stuff”, before realising he was actually watching a genius at work.

“The mistake a lot of people make in casting is they get so tied to the words and the character they wrote that they don’t see when somebody is better than what they have on the page,” he claimed.

In an interview with Conan O’Brien, Melissa admitted that when she read the script, the first person she thought of was the chef, Guy Fieri.

She said: “I wanted to do the shirt, the Kangol. Every scene, I would have my glasses on the back of my head.”

Unfortunately for the actor (and maybe the audience), the production team reined her in, and stopped her from looking too much like the Food Network star.

“I tried for a long time to convince them to let me wear short, white, spiky hair, and they were like, ‘You can’t actually be Guy Fieri’,” she laughed.

“Air Marshall Jon” is played by Ben Falcone, with whom Melissa has been married since 2005.

He has also made cameos in almost all of Melissa’s films, including Identity Thief, Spy, The Heat and Can You Ever Forgive Me?.

While Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo put together a hilarious script, with six Groundlings alum on set, there was always going to be some improvisation in the mix, too.

“I’ll be honest, I can’t remember what was scripted and what came out in improv anymore,” Maya Rudolph told Entertainment Weekly. “It all sort of bled together.”

Melissa McCarthy agreed: “In the rehearsal process, you really got to know everyone’s characters before you’re shooting. Even if you didn’t use the specific information, you’d start to build this backstory.

“We had this history as the characters. You’d get more and more comfortable with how [you were] going to play off of each other. I just remember thinking, ‘If this is what making movies is, this is mind-blowing’.”

Maya added that the director gave the cast “free rein to play”, so that by the time they started filming, they all knew each other’s creative processes.

“There was a stenographer who was typing everything that we were improvising. Then we’d come back, and there’d be new pages,” she recalled.

During those engagement party toasts, Paul Feig let Kristen and Rose improvise one-upping each other, with hilarious results.

“It went on forever. I just kept laughing. I remember thinking, “Oh, I’m going to have a hard time getting through this movie without ruining takes,” Melissa remembered.

Rose even pretended to speak Thai in one rehearsal, and the producers loved it so much that they made her learn a portion of Thai for real in the final cut.

Bridesmaids is set between Milwaukee and Chicago, but it was actually filmed in Los Angeles – and film and TV fans may recognise one of the sets from an iconic series.

The comedy was filmed in part at the same location used for the 1960s Batman TV series and film.

Helen’s lavish home, where Annie spectacularly flips out at the Parisian-themed bridal show, famously doubled as Wayne Manor in the retro show.

It’s also Eddie Murphy’s palatial home in Bowfinger and the estate of Kenneth Branagh’s conductor character in Dead Again.

Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson play Annie’s roommates in Bridesmaids, and reality ended up mirroring fiction for the funny duo.

“We played roommates so well in Bridesmaids, we thought, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it for real’,” Rebel explained on Conan O’Brien’s talk show in September 2012. “Except instead of annoying Kristen Wiig, we’re now annoying all the neighbours nearby.”

After the film came out, fans suspected they were siblings, or married, because their chemistry was so effortless.

“When we met it was like complete synchronicity,” Matt told the BBC in September 2015. “We’re both very laid back and we’re also quite driven professionally and I see that in her and she sees that in me but we’re not competitive because we just enjoy each other’s work.”

The pair lived together in Los Angeles for three years, until Rebel moved out after making the “decision to become a huge movie star and buy a house”.

The lengthy wait for the movie to get made meant that co-writer Annie Mumolo couldn’t RSVP for her role as a bridesmaid.

By the time the movie started filming, Annie was seven months pregnant, and her character was redeveloped for a new actor.

“I was like, I’m living my life and I was having a family,” she told The New York Times in 2021. “So, I got pregnant. [The film] had gotten sort of shelved, and then they called like two weeks later and said, ‘We’re back on!’ And it was like, ‘I’m pregnant. So that’s going to be great’.”

Annie eventually gave birth to her son a week and a half after filming wrapped on Bridesmaids.

Although Annie couldn’t take centre stage in the film, she does appear in the infamous plane scene, playing the woman sitting next to Annie on that turbulent flight to Las Vegas.

What happens in Vegas stays on the cutting room floor with Bridesmaids.

The release of 2009’s The Hangover forced the team to scrap a messy Sin City bachelorette party adventure that featured in Bridesmaids’ original script.

“We did not want to be compared to The Hangover,” Paul told Insider in 2021. “We did not want to hear, ’This is the female Hangover. That was our kryptonite.”

He later told Glamour: ”[The Hangover] was so big and successful and had done Vegas so well that we were kind of like, ‘Why would we do it again?’. I said, ‘They should just not get to Vegas. It should all fall apart on the plane’.”

This Vegas sequence would have included a visit to a male strip club, where Annie would have been pulled up on stage by a dancer dressed as a cowboy.

There was also a scene where the bridal party went to a male strip club and Annie gets pulled on stage by a cowboy stripper.

Recalling what the scene entailed, Paul told Business Insider: “He has her lie down on the dance floor and dances over the top of her, but ball sweat drips into her open mouth as she’s screaming.”

Jon Hamm plays Ted, Annie’s selfish love interest, in Bridesmaids – a role that was both uncredited and mostly improvised.

The Mad Men star’s lack of poster credit was his own request because, at the time, he was better known for his dramatic work, and he worried that his name being attached to the project would mislead audiences into thinking Bridesmaids was not actually a comedy.

He appeared in the film as a favour to Kristen Wiig, with whom he became friends after guest hosting an episode of SNL.

“I did that movie before there was a part, before there was a script, I said ‘yes’ to it. And [my] agents went, ‘Oh, well, shit. How do we, you know, ask for money?’,” Jon said on SiriusXM in 2022. “And I was like, ‘Don’t worry about it. Just let me let go and have fun with friends’.”

Paul Feig told Glamour that he thought it would be funnier to make the scene look less like romance, and more like “a professional wrestling scene”.

“It was like this big action scene,” he explained. “There’s nothing sexy about that scene at all, and that’s what made it so fun.”

Ant-Man actor Paul Rudd was originally supposed to appear in a scene with Annie, where his and Kristen’s characters go on an ice-skating blind date together.

The date, of course, goes horribly wrong, with Paul’s character falling to the ground and yelling expletives at children.

Paul Feig told Entertainment Weekly that the scene was “one of the funniest things I’ve ever been a witness to,” and was written to highlight Annie’s bad luck with guys. Unfortunately, this moment is cut from the final edit, but the seven-minute sequence was included on the DVD extras, and has since made its way to YouTube.

Paul Rudd wasn’t the only A-lister who was robbed of an appearance in Bridesmaids. Speaking to Business Insider, Paul Feig revealed in 2021 that Matt Damon was supposed to play himself in a fantasy cameo.

Describing the scene, the director said: “Annie goes in the dressing room to try on this really expensive dress, and suddenly she has a fantasy of what her life could be in this dress.

“It’s this romance feel with her running through the woods and Matt Damon is shirtless chopping wood.”

This romantic fantasy sequence was totally scrapped from the film by Paul and producer Judd Apatow, because “there needed to be a consequence to Annie’s actions”, and she also needed “to be humiliated in front of Helen and the other bridesmaids”.

“So,” he added. “We came up with the food poisoning from being at a shitty restaurant.”

Bridesmaids, sadly, was Jill Clayburgh’s last performance before her death.

Jill died between filming and the film’s release, which affected some of the jokes that made it into the final cut.

“We took some dirty Jill Clayburgh jokes out because I just thought, ‘that can’t be the last thing she says’,” Judd Apatow told The Playlist, admitting that even if the quips were still “funny” they could be perceived as “questionable”.

Some of these raunchier gags did make the DVD outtake reel, though.

Paul Feig recalled telling the late performer: “I can’t believe we’re making you say this.”

Her response? “Oh I love it.”

“She was so sincerely happy to be doing this kind of comedy that it’s a special memory for me,” he added.

Chris O’Dowd told HuffPost in 2013 that he originally auditioned for Bridesmaids with an American accent – but Paul Feig suggested he try it in his own.

“Paul Feig is a huge Anglophile and knew [The IT Crowd] really well and was a big fan of it,” Chris explained. “He said, ‘Hey, why don’t you try it in your own accent?’. And it just kind of went well and we improvised for a good while like that with Kristen – yeah, and it played well.”

Judd Apatow also approved of having an Irish love interest, believing it would make the love story a little less formulaic and, in Chris’ words, “odd”.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast in 2017, Kristen admitted that all the gross-out humour was added into her script by Judd Apatow.

“When people say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna give more female-centered movies a chance,’ you’re not reading the fine print, which is, ‘Oh, but, they have to be like this’,” she claimed. “They want to see women acting like guys.

“The scene was not our idea and it was not in the original script and we didn’t love it. It was strongly suggested for us to put that in there. I didn’t want to see people shitting and puking.”

Another of the most memorable scenes in Bridesmaids is the moment when the women get food poisoning while trying on wedding outfits.

It looked gross, but Paul Feig told Glamour that the “concoction” that made up the faux vomit actually consisted of oatmeal (“for a little bit of texture”), “some chopped up vegetables” and almond milk”.

Paul added that he and the crew made use of a “vomit cannon” at one point.

“There’s a scene that we didn’t put in the movie where Ellie’s character runs in, and Wendi’s like, ‘Get away from me’,” he noted.

“And so she runs down the hall and opens the door and projectile vomits across the room. But when we got in the editing room everyone was immediately like, ‘That’s just too much, we have to take that out.’ We do have some class.”

Kristen Wiig admitted recently that she was fairly sure the film would be a box-office failure.

“I remember after opening weekend, they were like, ‘Well, we tried,’” she said on a 2025 episode of Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast.

“We just thought, like, that was it. And then I think just more and more people kept seeing it and then it kind of happened later.”

Paul Feig also admitted on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s On Me podcast that he felt pressure for the film to succeed, even though it was “predicted to not do well right up until the day of release”.

As the case with almost all hit films, people have been desperate for a sequel. Although many key players – including Paul Feig – are open to the idea, Kristen Wiig has explicitly said she has no interest in revisiting Annie and her friends.

During a 2021 appearance on Andy Cohen’s Sirius XM show, she explained, “I just don’t want it to be translated as a negative thing, because we obviously love the movie [but] we feel like we told that story and we were just so excited to do other things.”

Bridesmaids is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video in the UK.