A Beautiful Mind (2001) on Netflix
John Nash arrives at Princeton in 1947 to study mathematics, hoping to publish original work of his own. A classified assignment from William Parcher sends him looking for hidden patterns.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb8.2/101,064,084 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes74%
Trailer
Plot summary
A Carnegie Scholarship brings John Nash to Princeton University in 1947, where he shares a room with Charles Herman and gets to know Sol, Ainsley and Bender, fellow graduate students in math and science. A conversation with his classmates about approaching a group of women in a bar turns into Nash's argument for cooperation over competition, and from it he develops a new concept of governing dynamics. That work wins him a post at MIT, and he brings Sol and Bender with him. In 1953 the Pentagon invites him to decipher encrypted enemy communications, and William Parcher of the Department of Defense recruits him for a classified assignment: to find hidden patterns in print and stop a Soviet plot. Nash grows obsessive and paranoid, and he falls in love with his student Alicia Larde.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Beautiful Mind (2001)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Before making A Beautiful Mind, director Ron Howard had already paid $1.5 million for the rights to a different schizophrenia biopic about a Yale Law School graduate, and had cast Brad Pitt in the lead, but scrapped the project after the real subject killed his fiancee during a psychotic episode in 1998.
SPOILER
In reality John Nash never had visual hallucinations; the roommate Charles Herman, Marcee Herman and the Defense agent William Parcher are all a scriptwriter's invention.- Tom Cruise was considered to play John Nash before Russell Crowe was cast, while for the role of Alicia Nash, Rachel Weisz turned down an offer to play the part and both Charlize Theron and Julia Ormond auditioned for it.
- The real John Nash was arrested in a 1954 police sting targeting gay men in Santa Monica and lost his security clearance as a result, though the charges were dropped and there is no evidence he was ever sexually active with men.
- The film omits that Alicia Nash actually divorced John Nash in 1963; the two only reconciled after he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in 1994, with Alicia letting him live with her as a boarder starting in 1970 before they eventually remarried in 2001.
- The makeup team first planned to age Russell Crowe across the film, but at Crowe's request Greg Cannom instead pushed his look towards John Nash's own facial features, using a new silicone-type makeup that cut application time from eight hours to four.
