There’s no doubt that the late Robin Williams is one of the most talented and beloved Hollywood actors of all time. Since he made his feature film debut in the 1980 comedy film Popeye, the actor went on to appear in more than 110 movies and television series. Some of his most iconic roles were in movies such as Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), TheDead Poets Society (1989), The Fisher King (1991), and Good Will Hunting (1997), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Through the course of his career, Williams appeared in numerous children’s movies, including beloved films such as Hook (1991), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Flubber (1997), and Disney’s Aladdin (1992). Williams not only did a terrific job as an actor but also did tons of improv for these films. In fact, on of his Flubber co-stars revealed that they could’ve made an entirely different film with Williams’ improvised scenes alone!

Wil Wheaton Admitted Robin Williams Improvised So Much In Flubber They Could’ve Made A Complete Different Movie

Flubber (1997) is a remake of the 1961 film The Absent-Minded Professor. Written by John Hugest and Bill Walsh and produced by Walt Disney Pictures, this sci-fi comedy film was a huge box office success, grossing almost $178 million at the box office worldwide, despite receiving mostly negative reviews from critics.

One of the biggest reasons why the movie was such a big success is due to Robin Williams’ incredible performance as mad scientist, Professor Philip Brainar. In fact, the Bicentenial Man star was Hughes’ first choice for the role.

However, at the time, Williams didn’t want to work with Disney, given that they had betrayed him in the past. So, Hughes had to consider other actors for the role, including Christopher Lloyd, Jeff Goldblum, John Lithgow, Tim Allen, John Goodman, and Sir Patrick Stewart. Ultimately, Williams made peace with The Walt Disney Company and Hughes was able to cast him in the lead of this film.

Casting Williams turned out to be the right choice. The actor not only did a phenomenal job playing Professor Brainar, he also made the movie so much funnier with his incredible improv skills.

According to Wheaton, Williams gave the crew so much footage they could’ve easily made an entirely different movie off his improv alone. Unfortunately, none of those improvised scenes made it to the final cut of the film.

Robin Williams Has A History Of Improvising

Throughout his career, Robin Williams did plenty of work as a voice actor, including voicing the Genie in Disney’s Aladdin. Like he did in many of his films, Williams decided to improvise a lot of his lines for this film. Talking with Variety, Disney animator Disney animator Ron Clements, who co-directed Aladdin alongside John Musker, revealed that Williams would almost never follow the script.

In fact, on his first day on the recording studio, Williams “started out recording the script as written a few times, then took off in a multitude of directions,”

Clements said, “The original scene was meant to be about three minutes long. Each take, Robin would add and embellish, so by the 25th (and last) take, the scene had expanded to about 20 minutes long!”

The crew was so excited to have Williams on the film that they decided to give him plenty of artistic freedom. This left them with so much material for the Genie that they had a hard time figuring out what to use for the film.

“We came up with a system. Everything Robin recorded was transcribed. John, Eric and I played it all back and circled every line and variation Robin did that we particularly liked. We gave all this to our editor, H. Lee Peterson, and he cut together a first pass of the scene. We kept editing and editing until we got it down to the proper length. Hopefully, we picked the best stuff, but there was a tremendous amount of strong material that didn’t make it,” Clements explained.

While allowing Williams to improvise as much as he wanted greatly helped improve the movie, it ended up costing Disney an Oscar. Ultimately, Aladdin was rejected as an entry for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar by the Academy Awards because of the excessive amount of dialogue that Williams improvised.

Robin Williams Improvising On Mrs. Doubtfire Caused The Film To Run Out Of Tape

Flubber and Aladdin weren’t the only times Robin Williams improvised on a movie set. In fact, the actor improvised so much while filming Mrs. Doubtfire that they would often run out of tape while filming!

Mrs. Doubtfire director Chris Columbus revealed that Williams asked him for permission to improvise his lines when they began filming.

“Early on in the process, he went to me, ‘Hey boss, the way I like to work, if you’re up for it, is I’ll give you three or four scripted takes, and then let’s play,’” Columbus told Variety. “By saying that, what he meant was he wanted to improvise. And that’s exactly how we shot every scene. We would have exactly what was scripted, and then Robin would go off and it was something to behold.”

While Williams’ incredible improvising scenes gave life to many funny scenes that made it into the movie, it also meant more work for the crew. Columbus revealed that on several occasions Williams improvised so much dialogue that he used up all the film that was loaded into the camera.

“It got to the point that I had to shoot the entire movie with four cameras to keep up with him,” the director admitted. “None of us knew what he was going to say when he got going and so I wanted a camera on the other actors to get their reactions…[the studio was] loving what they were seeing. Did they watch everything? I don’t think so. We shot almost 2 million feet of film on that picture.”