“Little Miss Sunshine” Cast Recalls Greg Kinnear Pranking the Late Alan Arkin and Other On-Set Memories for 20th Anniversary (Exclusive)

Jack SmartSun, July 26, 2026 at 2:59 PM UTC

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(Left-right:) Toni Collette, Alan Arkin, Abigail Breslin, Steve Carell, Paul Dano and Greg Kinnear in ‘Little Miss Sunshine’Credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures -

Little Miss Sunshine was released in theaters on July 26, 2006

Four of its stars, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Paul Dano and Abigail Breslin, reminisce with PEOPLE about the Sundance Film Festival breakout

Kinnear recalls pulling a prank, driving the movie’s van and preventing the late Alan Arkin from getting out to use the bathroom

Little Miss Sunshine is officially 20 years old!

The indie hit starring Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, Steve Carell, Abigail Breslin and the late Alan Arkin forever changed how audiences feel about road trip movies, children’s beauty pageants — and the Rick James song “Super Freak.”

Kinnear, 63, admits that he “didn’t know what it was going to become” while speaking to PEOPLE at the Sundance Film Festival, where Little Miss Sunshine first began taking audiences by storm in 2006.

(Left-right:) Alan Arkin in ‘Little Miss Sunshine’; Paul Dano, Toni Collette, Abigail Breslin and Greg Kinnear in January 2026Credit: FOX Searchlight; Arturo Holmes/Getty

“You never know when you’re making something how it’ll be received or what the life of the film will be,” Collette, 53, agrees.

“For it to be loved 20 years later — 20 years, my God — it’s just amazing,” she adds.

“I was nine or 10 years old, [and] I didn’t know what Sundance was,” Breslin, now 30, recalls. “I do remember, though, that first screening and everybody standing up and being slightly overwhelmed by how many people were around.”

Dano, for his part, still “remembers the first time we pushed the van,” referring to the many sequences in the movie of the Hoover family having to get their rickety van into gear.

At the Sundance premiere, the 42-year-old recalls, “I had never seen a movie where the audience claps during it, like a Broadway musical, a big number. That was a distinct Sundance memory for me. It was like, ‘They’re applauding during?’ ”

For Collette, Little Miss Sunshine comes to mind whenever she hears “anyone say anything about chicken,” she quips. “All I hear is Alan’s voice saying ‘the f---ing chicken!’ ”

Arkin, who died in June 2023 at age 89, won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in the Jonathan Dayton- and Valerie Faris-directed comedy-drama (which earned four nominations, including for Best Picture).

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Kinnear, Collette, Dano and Breslin each have a distinct highlight of working with the actor, who played a gruff grandfather to Breslin’s young Olive.

‘Little Miss Sunshine’Credit: Eric Lee/Fox Searchlight

“I remember the second the van took off from the production office — with Greg driving — Alan said, ‘I have to pee,’” Dano recalls. “And Greg refused to pull over. It was a bit.”

Kinnear also drove through “a full red light,” Dano adds, or “close to a red light if not one. You didn’t want to give Alan the chance to get out of the van to go, and so you blew right through it.”

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The As Good as It Gets star confirms that he was behind the playful prank, which occurred during rehearsals. “This is before we even got on the road and started shooting the movie,” Kinnear says with a smile, “which is the most dangerous movie ever made because maybe there was one follow car somewhere.”

Every scene filmed in the van, he adds, involved him actually driving and directors Dayton and Faris “contorted” in the vehicle “with a headset listening.”

‘Little Miss Sunshine’Credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures

“I like the idea that this was the most dangerous film ever made,” quips Breslin, whose favorite Arkin memory involved the late actor calling cut when he mistook her in-character tears for the real thing. “On the first take, he was like, ‘Cut, cut! Get her mother. She’s crying.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m acting.’ ”

“The tears — it’s just unbelievably beautiful,” Collette says of that scene. The Australian star calls Arkin’s performance throughout Little Miss Sunshine “so wrong and so funny,” while her costars remember him being worried that Breslin could hear his profanity.

But the young actress was busy listening to Kelly Clarkson‘s Breakaway via headphones, she says. “Alan was actually very concerned about it. He didn’t want me to hear that, and even at some of the screenings in New York and L.A., he would say to my mom, ‘Turn her around.’ ”

Quips Kinnear: “No children were damaged in the making of this movie.”

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