Kyle MacLachlan Reveals Elizabeth Taylor Required a Gift Every Day on Set of ‘The Flintstones’
The 1994 live-action movie The Flintstones brought an A-list cast to the town of Bedrock, from leads John Goodman and Rick Moranis to celebs with supporting roles, like Halle Berry, Jay Leno and even Elizabeth Taylor.
Taylor, however, had some strict demands in order to appear in the film.
Kyle MacLachlan, who played Cliff Vandercave, recalled shooting the movie on an episode of the “Dinner’s on Me With Jesse Tyler Ferguson” podcast. MacLachlan, 65, said the late actress demanded a gift every day she was on set.
"The cast was crazy. [Producer Bruce Cohen] got Elizabeth Taylor to do that movie. It was amazing," he said. "She had to have a gift every day."
Though MacLachlan tried to continue speaking, Ferguson interrupted him, seemingly astonished by the revelation.
"Wait, wait, wait, stop," he said. "She had to have a gift?"
“And she had to have, in the dressing room trailers, everything was green, she had to have greenery around her,” MacLachlan continued.
MacLachlan said that he received this information secondhand, but previous interviews with Cohen seem to confirm it.
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“[Cohen] probably told me and said, 'Don't ever tell anybody that.' Too late. It's too late,” he joked.
Cohen recalled shortly after Taylor’s death in 2011 how he wanted to make the experience “special” for her.
“I’d actually been to her house for a wardrobe fitting two weeks before,” he recalled. “She pulled me in very close and whispered into my ear, ‘Darling, you know that I like gifts on the first day of photography.’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ve heard of this tradition.’ And then she whispered, ‘I like Cartier, darling.’”
Thankfully, Cohen had the buy-in from Steven Spielberg to make it happen.
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“We didn’t have an Elizabeth Taylor gift allotment in the budget, so I went to Mr. Spielberg, who was the executive producer, and I said, ‘Steven, I need you to write me a personal check so I can go shopping for Elizabeth Taylor,'” he added. “He loved that idea and understood why we couldn’t put it in the budget.”
The Flintstones was the final movie that Taylor made before she died, though she took several TV roles in the late '90s and early 2000s. She used her role in the film as Pearl Slaghoople to raise $330,000 for the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. Taylor was a leading champion for HIV/AIDS research, using her platform to spread awareness during the 1980s and into the '90s.
Taylor died at the age of 79 from congestive heart failure.
