Stories from the set

Two producers competed for the right to adapt John Nash's life for the screen. Brian Grazer won this dispute, while Scott Rudin lost.

The Harvard scenes were actually filmed at Manhattan College.

The directing job was initially offered to Robert Redford, but he was unhappy with the shooting schedule.

Many actors were considered for the role of John Nash: Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner, John Travolta, Tom Cruise, John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, Robert Downey Jr., Nicolas Cage, Johnny Depp, Ralph Fiennes, Jared Leto, Brad Pitt, Alec Baldwin, Mel Gibson, Sean Penn, Guy Pearce, Matthew Broderick, Gary Oldman, and Keanu Reeves.

The love scene between the characters played by Crowe and Connelly was cut from the final version of the film.

John Nash (played in the film by Russell Crowe) was invited to the set to help the actors portray their roles more authentically. Russell Crowe later admitted that he was fascinated by the way John moved his hands and tried to do the same during filming.

Portia de Rossi, Catherine McCormack, Meg Ryan, Rachel Griffiths, and Amanda Peet auditioned for the role of Alicia. However, Ryan dropped out before production began. Salma Hayek also vied for the role of Alicia — curiously, she was born in the same town of El Salvador as her would-be character. The producers initially did not consider Jennifer Connelly for the role of Alicia. She had previously starred in the film «Requiem for a Dream» alongside Jared Leto. When Leto was auditioning for the role of John, Connelly helped him by sitting opposite and reading Alicia's lines (thus they acted out one of the dialogues). The producers did not cast Leto, but they liked Connelly as Alicia. In the end, the actress was confirmed for the role after Ron Howard compared her and Alicia Nash — the comparison covered education and facial features.

Despite the fact that the film presents a kind of biography of John Nash's life, some details of the great mathematician's life were deliberately omitted: 1) in his youth, John was bisexual — he had intimate relationships with both women and men; 2) John had an illegitimate child.

John Nash did indeed receive the Nobel Prize, but not alone—together with colleagues Reinhard Selten and Hungarian János Harsányi. Moreover, the founder of Game Theory was another Hungarian—János Neumann (John von Neumann). Nash stood out by managing to apply the principles of game theory in the world of business.

The manuscript that young John Nash shows to his advisor, Professor Helinger, is an authentic copy of an article published in the journal Econometrica under the title "The Bargaining Problem."