Actor Shares Story To Cement The Fact That Andre The Giant Was The World Champion At Getting Hammered

Ask any popular professional wrestling performer during the 1970s-1980s for their “drunk Andre the Giant” story and you’ll never hear the same story twice. Here’s a great one. 

Andre’s gargantuan drinking ability is well documented, and lengthy, because the dude drank all the time. If a guy’s drinking every day, he’s going to have more than his fair share of tales. Especially when the man in question is 7’4 and 550 pounds and can pound 7,000 calories in JUST BOOZE in one day. Andre did it EVERY DAY. Yet, Andre managed to have a long career in the ring and in movies. He was a functioning drunk.

The Daily Beast recently interviewed Carey Elwes, Andre’s costar in the classic film The Princess Bride, and asked what it was like to work with the wrestling legend. ON CUE, Elwes retold an Andre drinking story, and how even though Andre spent most of the film either drunk or nursing a hangover, Andre remained a true professional.

Andre’s drinking was the stuff of legend, too. You share a hilarious story in the book of Andre getting so wasted following the first script reading that he passed out smack in the middle of the lobby of the hotel, and hotel employees had to surround him with a velvet rope.

They decided that there was no shifting him. There’s no shifting a 550-pound, 7-foot-4 giant, so they had a choice: either call the authorities, and they didn’t want that kind of publicity, or wait for him to wake up, which was the wiser decision. It should be pointed out that Andre didn’t drink for the sake of drinking—Andre was in a lot of pain, God bless him. His back was injured from carrying all that weight around, and from having other wrestlers breaking chairs over his back. He was due to have an operation right after the shoot, and his doctor didn’t know what kind of pain medication to give him because of his size, so the only way that he could deal with the pain was to drink alcohol. And it didn’t affect him at all. He didn’t flub a line or miss a day. The guy could handle his liquor, let me tell ya.

Right. You mention this special drink he made, “The American,” which consisted of 40 ounces of various liquors poured into a pitcher, and he’d drink several of these in a single sitting.

Yes. The man was extraordinary. He never even slurred his words or was tipsy! He was absolutely a man who could consume vast amounts of alcohol and not have it affect him at all. I’ve never seen anything like it. I went drinking with him after our first screening in New York, and I was sipping a beer all night—which he thought was very funny. There was no way I was going to compete with that, because I knew he could consume 100 beers in one sitting.

Elwes goes on to explain that Andre made him try “The American” and that it tasted how he imagines airplane fuel tastes.

Long live the legend of Andre The Giant.

H/T Wrestling Inc.