This pre-Code film stirred controversy due its nude modeling scene featuring a teenage Marian Marsh. The actress wore a body stocking for the scene and, in the long shot where she runs from the room, an older body double was used instead of her.
[Marian Marsh on co-star John Barrymore] "He was really rather shy. Sometimes, after he would play a scene, everybody would applaud, and he would back into the wall! Always he was so helpful and so inspiring to me, and when you're with the greatest, you have to try to come up to his level. He knew he was doing that... he did it many times before."
Following his successful 1929 expedition to the South Pole, newly-promoted Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd returned to America as a national hero and visited the set of Svengali during its filming. A studio photograph of Byrd, John Barrymore (in costume), and actor George Arliss appeared in The New York Times on February 8, 1931.
In Svengali, John Barrymore became one of the first actors to wear contact lenses in motion pictures. The lenses were one of the earliest versions of hard contacts. Although clumsy and uncomfortable to wear, the lenses added a supernatural element to his performance.