Nia Vardalos Officially Reveals the Truth Behind 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding's Most Famous Joke [Exclusive]

Nearly 25 years after its release in theaters, My Big Fat Greek Wedding has stood the test of time as a cultural touchstone of a rom-com celebrating Greek heritage and the many loving relationship dynamics within a family. Nia Vardalos wrote the film with heavy inspiration from her family life, giving each character and their little eccentricities a loose but very personal connection to reality that, in the eyes of critics and audiences, made them all the more human. The result was a relatable clash of cultures and search for identity as Toula Portokalos falls for a non-Greek man, played by John Corbett, and her loved ones continue to insert themselves into the wedding plans. Yet, one of the things best remembered about the feature, above its central romance, is its connection to Windex.

Gus Portokalos' (Michael Constantine) belief that just about any ailment can be cured with Windex is one of many peculiarities that help the Potokalos family feel so alive. Throughout both the first and second film, he uses it to treat rashes, zits, and more, whether by applying it out of the spray bottle or completely soaking his elbow in a bowl of the surface cleaner. So iconic is his infatuation with the product that, when My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 was nearing its release in 2016, SC Johnson even joined forces with Universal Pictures for an entire promotional campaign around Windex. It's now part of the DNA of the franchise, to the point that My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, which takes place after Gus and his actor Constantine's death, still features the cleaner prominently. According to Vardalos, getting the licensed product on board in the first place required an appeal directly to SC Johnson, though selling the odd use of the solution was easier than expected.

Vardalos appeared at FanX Salt Lake City over the weekend for a panel moderated by Collider's Maggie Lovitt where the topic of the Windex miracle cure was brought up. While she shared that not everything in MBFGW is based in reality, she again affirmed that her real father did, in fact, use the product in the same bizarre way as Gus. She experienced his insistence on the healing power of Windex growing up and wanted to make that a core part of her on-screen father's caring, goofy, and a bit overbearing personality.

"The weirder the thing is in the movie, the more likely it is to be true, and the more commonplace, the more I made it up. For example, I'm gonna burst your bubble. Sorry, but we did not have a restaurant growing up. I made that up because I needed a base for the family, but, as I said, I really do have 27 first cousins, so it's like that. So my dad... when we were growing up, my dad was an immigrant from Greece, and my dad was cleaning his windshield. He had a wart on the back of his hand, and he was using Windex on it for, I don't know, six to eight months, and the warts started to dry up, and my dad went, 'Ahhh, OK.' So my sister had these warts on her knees, and she'd gone to every dermatologist, and my dad sprayed Windex on the warts, and the warts went away. And so, my dad started using it for everything. Everything in the house, something would happen, and my dad would say, ‘Put some Windex on it.’

Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Romance Is Your Favorite? Harry & Sally · Love & Basketball · Heated Rivalry · Titanic

Four great love stories, and four completely different ideas of what love actually is. One is a friendship that took twelve years to admit itself. One is two people who refuse to stop competing. One happens entirely behind closed doors. And one lasts five days and never stops mattering. Eight questions decide which one is really yours.

🍂Harry & Sally(1989)

🏀Love & Basketball(2000)

🏒Heated Rivalry(HBO Max)

🚢Titanic(1997)

FIND YOUR ROMANCE →

01

How does your love story start? The first scene tells you what kind of story this is going to be.

AWe are friends for years before either of us says anything. BWe want the same thing and neither of us backs down. CNobody can know, including our closest friends. DOne look across a room and everything changes.

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02

What do the two of you keep arguing about? Every great romance has one fight it has over and over.

AWhether this is actually happening, and what to call it. BWhose career comes first this year. CWhether we will ever be honest about this in public. DNothing small. When we fight, it is about everything.

NEXT QUESTION →

03

How do you show somebody that you love them? Grand gestures are easy to write. This is the harder question.

AI remember every single thing they have told me. BI show up to the things that matter to them. CI keep their secrets like they are my own. DI would give up something enormous for them.

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04

What is actually standing in the way? There is always something. Which something tells you the genre.

ATiming. We keep finding each other at the wrong moment. BAmbition. We both want big lives and they do not match. CThe world. It is not safe to be open about this yet. DEverybody around us has decided this cannot happen.

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05

Which romantic moment gets you every single time? Be honest. There is one that works on you and you know which.

ASomebody running across a city to say it before midnight. BSomebody in the stands who stayed until the very end. CA look across a crowded room that nobody else catches. DSomebody promising to hold on, and meaning it.

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06

What would you actually risk for the right person? Every romance asks this. Most people find out far too late.

AA friendship I could never get back. BThe plan I have had for my life since I was a kid. CMy privacy. All of it would become public. DEverything. I would not think about it for long.

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07

Where are the two of you in ten years? Some love stories are about the meeting. Some are about the staying.

AStill talking. We have never run out of things to say. BBuilding something together, both of us still ambitious. CFinally open about it, after years of being careful. DApart, and I still think about it constantly.

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08

Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your romance.

AI would rather talk to you than anybody else, forever. BI am not giving up either of us. We find a way to have both. CThis is mine, and I am not explaining it to anyone. DI would do the whole thing again, even knowing how it ends.

REVEAL MY ROMANCE →

Roll The Credits Your Romance Is…

Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to be somebody's person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of you.

Harry & Sally

You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most durable way anybody has found to do this.

• When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy, conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening.
• You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers.
• The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it.
• You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.

Love & Basketball

You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the relationship easier.

• This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of them equally seriously.
• You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a rival, and that never entirely goes away.
• It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each other, but whose turn it is this year.
• You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.

Heated Rivalry

The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting somebody you are not supposed to want.

• Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides, meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned.
• You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things more real than public ones.
• The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what it would cost either one to say it out loud.
• Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally stop hiding.

Titanic

You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version of it.

• Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five days, which is precisely the point of it.
• You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats decades of something merely comfortable.
• The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an enormous life afterwards because of it.
• You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the same way.

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SC Johnson Was Touched to Be a Part of 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding'

It was imperative to have Windex specifically be a part of the film to accurately capture the personal connection to Vardalso's family. Fortunately for the writer and star, SC Johnson was totally on board. When she wrote to the self-styled "family company" about using their product, that story and the overall focus of MBFGW on family and heritage didn't just convince them to license out the brand, but outright "proud" to be part of the groundbreaking indie movie. Even if they weren't huge fans of marketing Windex as a cure-all, they recognized the vision and real care behind the use of it, unknowingly cementing what would become a piece of rom-com history.

"And so I wrote it into the movie, and then we had to ask SC Johnson for permission to use Windex. They read the script, and they wrote us the most beautiful letter. They said, 'We would be so proud to be part of this movie that promotes family values. Please do not tell anyone to put the Windex on their warts.'"

My Big Fat Greek Wedding is currently streaming on HBO Max. Stay tuned here at Collider for more on the series' future under Vardalos.