Robin Williams Remembers the Wild Filming of Popeye

There are moments in any profession when you pause and wonder how things became quite so absurd. For most, these instances are fleeting, but for someone in comedy, such as Robin Williams, the line between the ridiculous and the everyday is often blurred. His career was built on embracing the outlandish, yet even he found himself questioning the sheer madness of it all at times.

Williams had his fair share of surreal experiences, from donning prosthetics and voices in Mrs Doubtfire to soaring about as Peter Pan in Hook. The world of slapstick and fantasy, as seen in Jumanji or Flubber, required him to act opposite invisible creatures, testing the limits of his imagination and patience. Yet, he was well-prepared for such chaos, having faced it head-on in one of his earliest roles.

The Mayhem of Popeye

Back in 1980, Williams took on the part of the spinach-loving sailor in Popeye, a project that set the standard for disorder. The concept alone—Williams as a cartoonish character alongside Shelley Duvall—was enough to raise eyebrows. Reflecting on the experience, he once described it as a

"crazy-ass movie"

, which, if anything, understated the situation.

As filming progressed, the production descended further into disarray. According to Williams,

"Literally, near the end of the movie … the studio had pooled all of the money, so all the special effects people left. It was Ed Wood the last weeks of the movie."

The comparison to Ed Wood, notorious for his own chaotic productions, was not made lightly. The atmosphere on set was, by all accounts, utterly unhinged.

Chaos Behind the Scenes

Barry Diller, who was then CEO of Paramount Pictures, recalled the prevalence of drugs during filming.

"You couldn’t escape it,"

he said, describing Popeye as the

"most coked-up"

production he had ever witnessed. He went on,

"Film cans were actually being used to ship cocaine back and forth to this set. Everyone was stoned."

The cast and crew, it seemed, were swept up in a haze that matched the film’s surreal tone.

With the budget depleted and the special effects team gone, the remaining cast had to improvise. Williams recounted a particularly bizarre moment:

"Shelley Duvall was in a pond, basically, with an octopus with no internal mechanism, having to drape it over her body like a feather boa. I’m in the water, and I’m kind of like sitting there."

The absurdity reached its peak as the team struggled to find a way to wrap up the story.

An Unforgettable Finale

As the end of filming approached, producer Robert Evans wandered the set, searching for a suitable conclusion. Williams remembered,

"Eventually, Robert Evans, who is there, is kind of wandering around going, ‘How do we end the movie? How do we end the movie?’ And I joked, ‘We could walk on the water like Jesus.’ And he’s like, ‘That’s the way! That’s how we’ll end the movie!’"

In the end, it was a combination of improvisation, a dreamlike atmosphere, and a remarkable tolerance for the bizarre that saw Williams through his breakout role.