Warning: This post contains spoilers for "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3."
Michael Constantine was responsible for saying some of the most enduring and quotable lines from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."
Gus Portokalos takes up the screen in the 2002 rom-com and its 2016 sequel, which is why his absence in the third movie, out Sept. 8, is palpable for audience members and for characters alike.
Constantine died in 2021 at the age of 94, and his character dies before the action of the third movie starts.
When the movie opens, the Portokalos family is reeling from their loss. The family's grief informs the plot. Toula — played by director, writer and executive producer Nia Vardalos — leads her family on a trip to Gus' ancestral village in Greece, where he was never able to return.
Before he died, Gus asked Toula to track down his childhood friends and give them his old diary with memories from his early years in the U.S. Finding his friends, though, proves to be difficult.
Meanwhile, Toula and her brother Nick (Louis Mandylor) deal with the family dynamic changing as their mother Maria (Lainie Kazan) struggles with memory loss, and they realize they are now in the roles their parents once occupied.
Without Toula's approval, Nick plans a burial for Gus, bringing the urn with his ashes all the way to his village. In one of the movie's many B-plots, Nick searches for the oldest olive tree around, one befitting a patriarch.
Nick's quest isn't easy — and it wasn't for the film's crew, either, who were scouring Corfu, where the movie was filmed, for a tree of the right stature and stateliness.
"We didn't think we'd be able to find such a big, majestic olive tree," production designer Grant Armstrong tells TODAY.com.
Then came an accidental conversation that ended up pointing them in the right direction.
"By chance, we got talking to an olive oil distributor. They said, 'We've got a few old trees.' We said, 'Do you mind if we go and have a look at them?'" Armstrong recalled.
"They drove us five minutes down a bumpy road. There was this grove of the most amazing olive trees," he continued. "It was almost jaw-dropping ... They're 1,500, almost 2,000 years old, these trees — beautiful. An amazing find, and it was a no-brainer from there."
Nick, similarly, only finds the tree he needs once he speaks to a local. He and an important new character are able to give Gus a send-off in a moving scene.
In Armstrong's view, finding the olive grove may have been more than the result of good luck. Maybe it was a sign of approval from the late actor.
"That might have been old Gus giving us his little blessing," he says. "It was a real find. We didn't think we'd be able to find it — and we found it."