20 facts you might not know about 'The Fugitive'

For four seasons and 120 episodes in the 1960s, Dr. Richard Kimble was on the search for the one-armed man who killed his wife, a crime that he was blamed for. Hence, the title The Fugitive. Dr. Kimble had to do a lot of second adventures to keep the show going, so the story maybe worked better for a film. Not that the show wasn’t a success. The Fugitive won an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, and its series finale was the highest-rated TV show of all time when it aired.

David Twohy had a couple screenplays to his name by the time he wrote The Fugitive, including Critters 2: The Main Course, but this would be his breakout film. He gets sole "story by" credit, but he had a little help on the screenplay. The film was co-written by Jeb Stuart, who was coming off the success of co-writing Die Hard. Twohy would go on to forge a partnership with Vin Diesel, as he wrote and directed all three Riddick movies.

Most of the movies we cover are directed by big names and notable film figures. Andrew Davis is admittedly not one of those. You’d be forgiven if this is the first time you’ve heard his name. However, he was a successful director, so let’s give him some love. Prior to The Fugitive, he directed Above the Law and Under Siege, two Steven Seagal action movies. After his biggest movie came out, he helmed Chain Reaction, Collateral Damage, and, weirdly, Disney’s Holes.

Ford was a huge star by 1993, but he was not immediately thought of for the role of Dr. Richard Kimble. Alec Baldwin, Kevin Costner, Michael Douglas, and Nick Nolte were all considered. Nolte thought he was too old for the role, but Ford, who got the part, is only a year younger than him.

Gerard is a vital character to The Fugitive as the U.S. Marshall trying to track Dr. Kimble down. Davis didn’t have to look past his previous film, Under Siege, to do his casting. He considered Gene Hackman, who was in that movie, but ended up casting Tommy Lee Jones, who was also in the film.

Jeroen Krabbe plays Dr. Charles Nichols, a vital role in the movie. However, originally Richard Jordan had been cast in the part. Sadly, Jordan had to drop out after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and even more sadly, he died three weeks after the movie was released.

Two doctors at the hospital are familiar faces now. Julianne Moore plays Dr. Anne Eastman. She would enjoy her breakout role in Short Cuts in 1993, the same year The Fugitive came out. Meanwhile, Jane Lynch plays Dr. Kathy Wahlund. She had previously had a small role in 1988’s Vice Versa, but that was it.

Dr. Kimble is a doctor in Chicago, and he spends a lot of the movie on the run in rural Illinois. However, none of those scenes were actually shot in Illinois. Instead, the movie was filmed down in North Carolina. They filmed the train crash down there, and the dam in the movie is the Cheoah Dam in the Tar Heel State.

Davis was from Chicago and had set a lot of his previous films in Chicago. And yet, he’s the one who really didn’t want to do any actual filming in the Second City. He thought it would be too cold, and that would make shooting difficult and miserable. Spoken like a native Chicagoan. Ford wanted to shoot in Chicago, though, and his star power won out.

Davis wasn’t wrong about one thing: It was incredibly cold in Chicago. When they were filming at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, the wind chill was minus-six degrees. Funnily, The Fugitive was one of two movies shooting during that one parade. Michael Apted was shooting his film Blink at the same time, and the two crews bumped into one another occasionally.

To hear Davis tell it, the screenplay was more a loose guideline than anything else. He also says he never met Twohy, and Stuart was on set helping them rewrite things as they went along. Davis also said that he and the actors came up with some of the key plot points. Corroborating this to some degree, Lynch said that she and Ford worked up new dialogue for their scene together, because Ford didn’t like the version of the scene in the script.

While Ford was filming Kimble’s escape in the woods, he damaged ligaments in his leg, which caused him to limp. So that Kimble could also have the limp for the rest of the movie, Ford put off having surgery until after he had completed filming.

In 1994, one year after it was released in the United States and much of the world, The Fugitive was released in China. This was notable, as the Chinese government had put restrictions on the screenings of foreign films. The last American movie to be released in theaters in China had been 1985’s First Blood.

The Fugitive made $23.76 million in the United States its first weekend, a record for an August opening. It would proceed to be the top movie in the box office for a whopping six weeks in a row. All in all, The Fugitive made $183.88 million in the United States, making it the third-highest-grossing movie of 1993.

An action thriller making a ton of money? Sure, that makes sense. An action thriller that also gets a lot of love from the Academy Awards? That’s a bit surprising. And yet, The Fugitive received seven Oscar nominations. They were mostly in technical categories, but it was nominated for Best Supporting Actor thanks to Tommy Lee Jones — and also for Best Picture, of all things.

The editing, score, and cinematography of The Fugitive did not win, but you know who did? Jones, who took home Best Supporting Actor. Maybe it’s for his reading of the line “I don’t care.” A lot of people found Jones’ acceptance speech notable not for what he said, but how he looked. Jones’ head was completely shaved because he was filming the movie Cobb.

Because of when Ford was available, The Fugitive was made on a compressed timeline. They had all of 10 weeks between the start of filming and the day it was released in the theaters. To make that happen, it took a team of editors working around the clock. Six editors got nominated for Best Editing at the Oscars, which set a new record. Rarely do more than three people work to edit a film.

There wasn’t any more story to tell about Dr. Kimble apparently, but there was some meat left on the bone with Sam Gerard. Jones’ character got to star in his own film in 1998’s U.S. Marshals. This time, Wesley Snipes played the wrongfully accused man who Gerard is tracking down.

In India, The Fugitive has been turned into movies twice. On top of that, The Fugitive was turned into a TV show, again, in 2000. Granted, it was a TV show originally, but this version of the story seemed to be built on the success of the 1993 movie, as opposed to the 1963 TV show. However, this new version of The Fugitive only lasted one season, ending on a cliffhanger. The 1998 Leslie Nielsen movie Wrongfully Accused is also largely a parody of The Fugitive.

Pantoliano’s character Cosmo was supposed to die, according to the script. However, hoping there might be a sequel, Pantoliano lobbied to have Cosmo survive. In fact, he has admitted to going as far as to add some groans and to moving his legs to indicate his character was still alive. It worked, as Pantoliano is indeed in U.S. Marshals.