Sir Ian McKellen credits Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus as one of his favorite Shakespearean performances on film.
Director Kathryn Bigelow decided to offer Jessica Chastain the lead role in Zero Dark Thirty (2012) after Ralph Fiennes showed her a rough cut of this film.
Gerard Butler's first stage role was in a production of "Coriolanus". He was poked in the eye with a wooden stake during rehearsals for the play.
Although the characters wear present-day clothes, the film is set in ancient Rome. In the scene where Caius Martius tells his troops, "Make you a sword of me", you can see graffiti reading "Non illegitimi carborundum." This is mock-Latin and supposedly means, "Don't let the bastards grind you down."