Monty Python Cast a Random Tour Group in ‘Life of Brian’

While most of the roles in a Monty Python film tend to go to members of the group, obviously some do end up being played by non-Pythons. Various supporting parts were played by well-known actors, as well as frequent Monty Python collaborators Neil Innes and Carol Cleveland. Sadly, whichever bunny rabbit played The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog seems to have been uncredited.

For their second film, the controversial 1979 Biblical spoof Monty Python’s Life of Brian, director Terry Jones stumbled upon a new source of on screen talent: random tour groups.

Python scholar Kim “Howard” Johnson was invited to the set of Life of Brian in Tunisia to document the filming. In 2008, he published his diaries from that time in the book Monty Python's Tunisian Holiday: My Life with Brian. Howard’s account is full of vivid behind the scenes details — such as how John Cleese was preoccupied with cracking the final episode of Fawlty Towers, and kept asking people if they had any good hotel stories to share. 

The book also recounts how finding English speakers to fill smaller parts wasn’t easy. So at one point, the filmmakers recruited a group of British women who were part of a tour group organized by Thomson Tours to be in the movie. Jones had them don fake beards for the stoning scene. He even had them practice the scene by throwing bits of crumpled up paper. Although, as Johnson noted, on the first day of work, the “ladies became more uncontrollable and silly” so Jones “decided to call it a day.” 

Shooting the scene was complicated and time consuming. Not to mention hot. At one point, Cleese offered the tour group his autograph “in exchange for some suntan oil.” The “admiring” tourists then asked Cleese to do his trademark silly walk, but he politely refused, claiming that he hadn’t performed that particular move in years. Which may have been true, but he was certainly able to do it when the Pythons performed at the Hollywood Bowl in 1982.

Cleese later told Johnson that he couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized and asked to do his silly walk. 

Ultimately, the tourists did a good job in the scene, but were seemingly tired and slightly disillusioned with the magic of movies by the end of filming. Still, the Pythons enlisted yet another Thomson’s tour group while filming the scene in which Brian discovers that he is being worshipped as the messiah by a massive crowd of followers, who have staked out his home.

English-speaking extras were “strongly-preferred” because the scene required the crowd to respond to Brian and his mother in unison.

This scene also happened to be Graham Chapman’s nude scene. At one point two of the “older” women in the group went poking around the dressing caravans in search of autographs, only to find Chapman “stark naked,” causing them to turn pale and leaving them “completely at a loss.”

Which gives a whole new meaning to the term “vacation package.”