Curiosidades

Michael Douglas turned 68 during filming, making him a few months older than Liberace was when he died. Although played by 42-year-old Matt Damon, Scott Thorson was only 18 when he met Liberace, and 23 when their relationship ended in April 1982. He was still only in his twenties when Liberace died. Played by 30-year-old Boyd Holbrook, Cary-James was also only 18 when he met Liberace.

In Scott Thorson's book Behind the Candelabra, he notes that "in celebrity-saturated Palm Springs only two stars...took the trouble to pay their last respects" at the memorial service for Liberace. One was actress Charlene Tilton, and the other was Kirk Douglas, father of Michael Douglas.

In reality, Liberace was forty years older than Scott Thorson.

Special effects were used to digitally graft the actor's head onto the body of Philip Fortenberry, a Juilliard-trained Liberace virtuoso who was the in-house entertainer at the (now closed) Liberace Museum in Las Vegas for years.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Rob Lowe described the make-up regimen used to transform him into the heavily plastic-surgeried Dr. Jack Startz: "It's tape and pulled behind my head. It's literally what they used to do in the early days of cinema before there were facelifts for actresses. You know, Joan Crawford, her whole career was this. You tape, you pull around the back of the head, but you have to have a wig because it covers the elastic. We did that, and I'm also wearing a dental piece and then I'm doing a couple of things, a couple of tricks with my own face, the way I'm holding it. Then of course the makeup is literally like Earl Scheib autobody paint sprayed on my face....It was actually really painful, because being pulled that long and that hard for a 12-hour day - it gave me migraines. We shot during the summer. It was unbelievably hot. The wig, being pulled, it was definitely not the most comfortable experience physically for sure."