Diane Keaton Really Was the Center of the Family
If you book Diane Keaton, the rest will come. She was first to officially sign on to play dying matriarch Sybil Stone in The Family Stone after reading writer-director Thomas Bezucha's script, after which he was able to attract an all-star cast.
But, the Oscar winner told Girl.com.au in 2005, Sarah Jessica Parker "read it first and loved it. And they couldn't quite get it on for some unknown reason. And then when I signed on then they gathered together everybody, because then they pretended like they had a movie, but they didn't until they got everybody else."
Keaton "took a real leap of faith," Bezucha recalled to CNN in 2025. "You feel lucky when you see a shooting star, and I feel like I got hit by a comet."
And on set, producer Michael London told CNN, "Diane was the mom to everybody."
Keaton bought them all lotto scratchers or wine every week and she gifted the whole cast and crew with "the most gorgeous wine opener" London had ever seen in his life.
Sarah Jessica Parker Wanted to Play Against Type
After becoming synonymous with Sex and the City's gregarious, ever-curious Carrie Bradshaw, taking on the role of "controlling, rigid and tightly wound" Meredith—the girlfriend eldest son Everett Stone brings home for the holidays—was an admitted departure for Parker.
"She's also intractable and inflexible," the Emmy winner described her character in the film's production notes, "and when she finds herself out of her element at the Stone house, she turns into a wreck of a person."
But, Parker explained, "I grabbed the opportunity to play Meredith."
And she didn't worry about what people thought of the character, which was not much. "I just want them to think she is real," she told indieLondon in 2005. "I want her to be believed by the audience."
That being said, Parker defended Meredith in 2018, telling Vulture, "I didn't think she was unlikable at all. Especially in romantic comedies, there's this idea about likable, relatable gals. I think it does a huge disservice to the billions of women who are all wonderfully different."
Rachel McAdams Preferred Playing "Unlikable Characters"
Amy, the youngest Stone sibling played by Rachel McAdams, is in retrospect considered the most relatable of the bunch. But the prickly teacher who lives in her parents' attic while getting her master's degree is also kinda mean.
“I’d read the script a few years ago,” McAdams told Variety in 2005. “It’s one of those scripts that I remember exactly where I was when I read it. It just really hit me. Amy felt so complicated and had a lot of love to give. She’s a person that’s so protective of her family, but it’s a confused love issue for Amy—and that’s fun to explore.”
Bezucha "encouraged me not to hold back," she explained, "saying, 'There's no such thing as being too rotten.'"
The Family Stone Originally Had a Different F-Word in the Title
The film's original title was "F--king Hating Her," referring to Sybil's extreme initial dislike of Meredith, before that was toned down to "Hating Her," and then ultimately it became The Family Stone.
Diane Keaton Gave Sarah Jessica Parker Hell
Keaton adored Parker, but she gave her good-natured hell during filming.
"Teasing is the best thing in my life," Keaton told Girl.com.au about poking fun at Parker throughout the shoot. "My father used to torture me with teasing, and now I'm carrying the legacy on."
At least Parker knew that Keaton wasn't actually being cruel, thanks to "the wisdom of the ages." Parker explained, "Simply going on and saying, 'This is the way she needs to work. I don't have a process that I'm going to impose on her, but I'm perfectly happy to make her feel comfortable.'"
Besides, Parker added, "It's not unfamiliar. I have brothers. I have a husband. It's fun to make fun…You have to have an implicit understanding that this is what it is. It's swordplay."
Bezucha, however, told SFGate at the time, "All I can say is, sometimes Sarah Jessica would leave the set after a take with Diane, and her parting words would be, 'I like to believe she's in character.'"
Diane Keaton Actually Teased Everyone
Luke Wilson chipped a tooth and, when he asked Keaton for a dentist recommendation, she gave him a psychologist's number.
As Dermot Mulroney put it to SFGate in 2005, "Diane plays hard. On the first day of rehearsals, she said to me, 'Is that how you're going to dress for all the rehearsals?'"
The Actors That Rehearse Together, Stay Together
Bezucha "forced us to rehearse," Keaton said in a Fox Movie Channel behind-the-scenes featurette. "I hate to rehearse."
But in hindsight, she noted, "It was very smart of Tom to try to get us together socially, like, 'Let's have dinner.' It was a very nice way to enter a movie. Usually it's sort of like, 'A dinner?'"
Wilson agreed that "it was really good" to come together for meals and to play charades—as the Stones do in the film.
The ensemble, Bezucha explained, could then "act without having to perform."
ASL in the Family
An American Sign Language instructor worked with all the actors whose characters were supposed to be fluent in ASL to communicate with Thad Stone, who was portrayed by deaf actor Ty Giordano.
Keaton admittedly had a hard time getting the hang of it, calling herself a "slow learner" in the FMC featurette.
"I did something so wrong," she shared. "I was supposed to sign 'OK' and I think I signed '[bleep].'"
Diane Keaton Took Pride in Her Fiercest Matriarch Moment
Referring to when Sybil claps back at Meredith's ignorant comments about Thad and his partner Patrick, Keaton—whose daughter Dexter and son Duke were 10 and 4 at the time—told SFGate, "I loved who I was at the dinner table. I think it's one of my finest moments, as a person, in the movie, because I'm defending my son, whom I adore, worship and utterly believe in. I'm a progressive mom, and I like what I represent there."
That's a Real Christmas Feast
Chef Valerie Aikman-Smith was enlisted as a food stylist to make sure all scenes of food prep and feasting, as the Stones do on Christmas Eve, looked realistic and, ultimately, appetizing.
Home for the Holidays
While the Stone family homestead is supposed to be in an unspecified New England college town, they actually set the scene on camera in Madison, N.J. A blizzard that rolled in as production got underway made the area look especially picturesque.
A residence in Greenwich, Conn., stood in for the exterior of the house, while the interiors were cozily decorated Hollywood sound stages.
“This is fabulous,” Keaton said in the production notes of the Stone house. “But I wouldn’t live here if you paid me.”
Diane Keaton Brought Her Own Wardrobe
It was no coincidence that Sybil Stone dressed like Diane Keaton. And you'd be forgiven for thinking the actress is wearing one of her signature menswear-inspired overcoats throughout the film rather than a cozy bathrobe.
Which, incidentally, was Keaton's personal Beacon bathrobe, which she wore with her own pajama bottoms, socks and slippers.
How to Drop a Strata
Asked how many times she ended up splattered with strata—the breakfast casserole Meredith so painstakingly prepares, only to lose her grip and end up on the floor covered in eggs (but finally bonding a little with Sybil and Amy)—Parker told Vulture, "Many times."
"We did it a lot because it was covered from a bunch of different angles," she recalled. "As always, before those scenes, it's a lot of discussion about how it's going to happen…But it has to feel completely out of control and reckless and spontaneous."
In the end, Parker was "completely covered with it," and had to "stay covered in it. Like, I couldn't clean up. I had to stay because they were going in for tighter shots, and we couldn't try to recreate how it had spilled on me. I spent many, many hours staying in that outfit."
Meredith's Incessant Throat Clearing Was Scripted
Parker told Vulture that Meredith's throat-clearing tic that comes out when she's nervous was written into the script "from the beginning."
Textured Portrayal
Bezucha showed costume designer Shay Cunliffe some Victorian Christmas cards that "had a warm, burnished, golden ruddy feeling to them," she shared in the production notes. And in addition to extending that palette to the film's production design, Cunliffe said, Bezucha wanted "no blue tones in the film's wardrobe."
Meanwhile, Cunliffe felt that Wilson's free-spirited Ben Stone, having flown in for Christmas from his home in Berkeley, Calif., "cried out for jeans," but she made do with corduroy pants. Which, incidentally, also seem perfectly appropriate for a pot-smoking West Coast film editor.
How Diane Keaton Tuned Out the Noise on Set
Keaton wore headphones, Parker told Vulture, "basically until they call action."
"I think it's a very interesting way to stay focused," she continued. "A set is wonderfully chaotic."
Meredith's Drunken Dance Was a Departure for Sarah Jessica Parker
"That particular scene was the hardest I've ever done," Parker, who doesn’t drink "at all" told indieLondon of the moment when Meredith gets drunk and cuts loose, proving she's a normal person underneath the rigid exterior. "I don't dance in real life. I don't go to clubs or dance at parties. I am happy that everyone else does and I love watching. So that piece of acting was really embarrassing."
That's Me and You, Kid
Meredith gets it right, finally, when she gifts all the members of the Stone family with a framed black and white photo of Sybil taken when she was pregnant with Amy.
The picture, though edited to make Sybil look pregnant, was from Keaton's own archive, taken when she was 27 by her mom Dorothy Deanne.
"That moved me more than anything in the movie," Keaton told Girl.com.au, "because that picture was, to me, about my mother."
She explained, "I had the strangest feeling when I looked at that picture—which, I hate that picture—but I had this feeling that, you know, that's the best acting I've ever done in my whole entire life is that portrait that my mother took. So, the whole thing about motherhood and, you know, your sense of honor to your mother had such resonance for me in that moment, and I just thought that Tom Bezucha captured that in such a lovely way about, you know, life going on...It's my favorite moment in any movie that I've ever been in, is my mother's photograph of me, because she took it."
Why Diane Keaton Was a True Original
Keaton memorably "liked asking very personal questions," Parker told CNN, about "everything from money to, like, really funny, provocative topics.
"I think it was simply because she was so interested in people," the actress added. "She loved knowing odd facts about people and what makes a person an individual was very interesting to her."
And, Parker noted, Keaton was the first person she ever saw put ice cubes in a glass of Pinot Noir.
Thomas Bezucha Understands Why The Family Stone Isn't for Everybody
"You can't be like, 'Oh, they get it wrong,'" the director told the Wall Street Journal in 2023 of the range of emotions The Family Stone inspires. Not least because, while it has its funny parts, the end result is pretty devastating. "Everybody has their own experience. I fully see why people might hate the movie. Not just the characters. But the movie. That they might call bulls--t on the whole thing. But for me it always had the logic of an old Hollywood musical without the songs."