By Katerina Georgiou

But don’t wait to see it, warns Vardalos. “Theatre owners are looking for a sure thing, so we need to tell them this is a sure thing or they’ll replace it with films like “Transformers,” she said, referring to the big-budget blockbuster.

Vardalos calls her new film “a love letter to Greece.” “It is a place where people believe magic happens, and I’m here to tell you I know it does,” she said during a recent phone conversation.

When it comes to magical things, Vardalos is a credible source. Her own life reads like a Cinderella success story: going from Hollywood hopeful to Oscar nominee seemingly overnight. But she’s quick to note: “Luck is opportunity meeting hard work. That’s what happened to me with my first movie,” she said. “I had already written a script when Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson came to the play, so that was my preparedness.”

She was raised to believe that with hard work anything is possible. But it turned out “not to be that true” she said.

For all her accomplishments something was still lacking. “I couldn’t figure out how to get a child into my life,” said Vardalos, now 46. “I’m very grateful for the career success, but…for me it felt less special because I wanted to be a parent.”

Today her battle with infertility is well documented, but her struggle to have a child was the “big secret” she’d been hiding ever since she burst onto the scene with “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Her transformative journey to create a family inspires her latest film. Seven years after her meteoric rise to stardom, she’s back in theaters with a romantic comedy about a woman who finds her kefi, or passion for life, while leading a tour group through the mystical sites of Greece.

Life Imitates Art

Although “My Life In Ruins” was written by Mike Reiss, one of the writers of “The Simpsons Movie,” Vardalos contributed to the script, taking a page from her own life to enhance the story. “I promised Mike when we brought him into Playtone (Tom Hanks’ production company) that this was going to be the best experience of his life working with these people. Because they’re the greatest people on earth. And I said, this is what we’re going to do: I’m going to add some things to your script and I’m never going to take your credit. I just want to add some authenticity.”

Soon afterwards, Nia and her alter ego Georgia found themselves on a journey to Greece to get back their kefi—albeit for different reasons.

In the film, Nia plays a Greek-American history professor who has moved to Greece to work as a tour guide after being unlucky in love and unable to land her dream job back home. But her heart’s desire is to get back her mojo or kefi as the locals call it—and as Anthony Quinn made famous in Zorba the Greek.

An academic who takes pride in her Greek roots, Georgia is disenchanted when she’s assigned (yet again) to lead a group of hedonistic tourists more interested in eating ice cream and frolicking on beaches than visiting Greece’s abundant cultural treasures.

To make matters worse, the tour agency sticks her with Greece’s version of Chewbacca, Procopi “Poupi” Kakas (Alexis Georgoulis). It’s amazing he can see his feet through all that hair let alone drive the bus.

Rounding out Georgia’s misfortune, she runs into her rival tour guide – the scheming Nico (Alistair McGowan) – every step of the way. Through bribery and trickery, Nico has ensured his A-listed group gets the royal treatment. Meanwhile Georgia’s “Group B” is forced to roll through Greece in a dilapidated bus that blows steam instead of air conditioning. They’re also relegated to budget hotels where the coffee-guzzling owner (played by Vardalos’ husband Ian Gomez) propositions female guests over postage stamps.

The problem is that Georgia perceives life as difficult and isn’t able to let go long enough for her soul to fully experience the magic of Greece. So it’s up to the group’s “funny guy” Irv, (Richard Dreyfuss) to prod her out of her comfort zone and get her to embrace life instead of focusing on all the obstacles. With his guidance, Georgia learns to listen to her heart instead of her over-educated mind.

“The truth of the matter is wherever you go there you are,” said Vardalos. “So if you run away from your problems you look in the mirror and they’re still there.”

Just as life had called upon Georgia to take a leap of faith and go with the flow, it was doing the same with Vardalos. After 10 years of battling infertility, she had to accept that her path to motherhood would take a different direction than the one she had originally envisioned for herself.

“Parenthood isn’t for everyone, but without it, I felt my life would be lacking…

For a while I did say: “why is this happening to me? The only thing I can think is that…it was just this karmic slap. We, the fates, are going to give you huge success with “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” but we’re not going to let you be a parent. And so, I kind of shrugged and thought: “this is my fate.”

She retreated from the public eye and spent a “quiet period of reflection” at home with her husband. “I just didn’t have the kefi to go on camera,” she said. “I couldn’t fake it. I didn’t want to smile and pretend. There was no way through this grief other than to walk it and go through it.”

So she kept busy off-camera, writing scripts for Tom Hanks and Jonathan Demme. Though a difficult, soul-searching period, it was liberating for her creatively.

“I’m not afraid to go to places in my writing that aren’t funny—dramas, tragedies…different things. I just poured my angst out and let scripts go where they wanted to go…that was a freeing process to not only have to write romantic comedies,” she said.

In the meantime, her early attempts at adoption proved difficult, and though she was offered the chance to cut the adoption line, she never considered using her star power to trample the rights of other would-be parents. For all her hard-earned fame, she suddenly felt transported back to her earlier angst-ridden days in Hollywood, when she had difficulty getting acting jobs and had to write roles for herself.

So she mustered up the drive and persistence that had propelled her to stardom and kept her “eyes open” for adoption opportunities. “I just kept searching the internet,” she said. “So when I stumbled on an American Foster Family Agency I went: “here’s a path.” I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I chose to believe the agency when they assured me that I would be a mother by the end of the year…and I thought: “well, I’m going to go and make this movie and we’ll see.”

Around nine months later, Vardalos became a mother. Since the adoption in 2007, she and her husband have chosen to keep the toddler out of the spotlight. “Now it’s all worked out and I have my beautiful, perfect little daughter,” she said. “So God forbid, the next crisis that I’m in, I’m just gonna ride it out. Yia kalo— there’s always a reason.”

For Vadalos, the moment of clarity came when she and her husband brought their daughter to church one Sunday and the priest offered to bless her with a special prayer for adoption. “I realized then that the reason it was so hard for me was because I was supposed to find this little girl,” she said. “And so, in the same way when I make a movie, the ones that are more difficult to get made are usually the more fun.”

A Family Affair

The idea that families are created in different ways isn’t just the subtext of her personal life but of her films as well. “In my struggles with my fertility, I realized that I’m very, very family oriented,” she said. So it’s not surprising that her films echo this theme.

Vardalos clearly has a gift for synthesis—a knack for bridging differences through laughter. Like “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” “My Life In Ruins” brings culturally diverse people together as a family.

At first glance, Georgia’s tour group looks like a mismatched band of misfits. There’s Georgia in the midst of a personal and professional crisis, a couple of Spanish divorcees, an American widower and a medley of others—all of whose lives have intersected for a brief moment in time. But their shared experience bonds them and their interaction teaches Georgia, in particular, something about herself.

As for those critics who’ve attacked the film’s characters as ethnic stereotypes, Vardalos says they’ve missed the point. She applauds Director Donald Petrie for taking the “risk” of allowing the characters to initially be seen through Georgia’s narrow perspective so that they have room to evolve as individuals by the end of the film.

“He makes them seem like obnoxious stereotypes because he’s showing the audience them through Georgia’s unhappy eyes,” she said. “When the tourists change and become happy human beings they actually haven’t changed at all. She’s changed—her vision, her worldview has changed—and she begins to see them as the people they really are.”
But in real life the cast was nothing like the characters they played. They took in all the sites together and marveled at Greece’s natural wonders while having a fantastic time.

“We laughed so hard at each other,” said Vardalos. It was one of those really relaxed film sets because we were together in one of the most beautiful settings on the planet. On our days off we went climbing, we went to cafes, we went to Lycabettus. I’d ask everyone: “Are you OK?,” and they’d say: “Yeah, we’re on Delphi!”

One of the most memorable scenes in the film expresses a similar sense of wonderment when Georgia assembles the group at the Acropolis towards the end of the journey. It’s at that moment she senses the invisible strands of her life coming together as she listens to the wind blowing through the columns. Once again, it was a moment drawn from personal experience.

“When I was reading Mike Reiss’ script I was trying to find the perfect way of expressing what it is I love about the Parthenon, and on the plane there I still didn’t have the scene. I still didn’t have the words. Well, when we got to Greece I just walked up there on a scout, to see which way the director was going to shoot from…to get a feeling. And that’s when I heard it. I know when I see it…when I feel it. When it’s right, I don’t touch it again. If it’s rooted in truth I know it will play. It’s always such a lesson no matter how much I obsess about something, occasionally, when I take a step back from it, that’s when it clicks into place.”

And so it seems the pieces of Vardalos’ own life have come together nicely. Since wrapping “My Life In Ruins,” she directed her first film, “I Hate Valentine’s Day,” based on her original script which co-stars John Corbett.

Still, she says, nothing compares to the “awed sense of satisfaction” that comes with motherhood. And, at least for now, she’s content to go with the flow. “Whatever happens next it will be interesting and surprising to me because, for once, I’m not going to plan it.”