Everyone in the Portokalos family worries about Toula (NIA VARDALOS). Still unmarried at
30-years-old, she works at Dancing Zorba's, the Greek restaurant owned by her parents, Gus
(MICHAEL CONSTANTINE) and Maria (LAINIE KAZAN) and smells like garlic bread. Her days are
drab and dull, just like her hair, her clothes, and her attitude. Toula listens quietly as
her family tsk-tsks about her sad situation. She refuses offers by her father to send her
to Greece to find a husband. It's like she doesn't want to get married. The very thought
sends her relatives into a mad fit of genuflection. Still, Toula wishes for something
more, something for herself. Just when she's wishing she were braver, or prettier, she
locks eyes on a tall, handsome stranger, in the family restaurant and she freezes, like
one of the Greek statues that line the front of the family's house. The handsome stranger
barely notices her.
Toula is ready for a change. Unfortunately, the rest of her family is not. She devises a
plan to sign up for a computer class despite her father's old-world objections ("Why
does she need college? She's smart enough for a girl!"). It's no shocker that he's
out of touch, though. He thinks of Windex as a miracle cure-all and that kimonos were
invented by the Greeks, along with philosophy and astronomy. A few computer classes, some
contact lenses and a new attitude are all the jump-start Toula's life needs. She takes a
job at her aunt's travel agency, where this time, the handsome stranger locks eyes on the
transformed Toula. He is Ian Miller (JOHN CORBETT), a high school teacher who is tall,
handsome and definitely not Greek. In no time, he's asked her out on a date and soon they
are falling in love. But Toula isn't sure which will be more upsetting to her
old-fashioned father, that Ian is a Xeno (foreigner) or that he's a vegetarian.But none of
it matters once he asks her to marry him. The two still stand a fighting chance of being
happy if Ian's country club parents can get along with Toula's parents, aunts, uncles,
grandma and her twenty-seven first cousins. And according to Aunt Voula, since, "He
don't eat no meat? It's alright, I'll make lamb."
Toula knows that if Ian can pass muster with her crazy relatives and get baptized in the
Greek Orthodox Church…their big fat Greek wedding, including one powder blue
limousine, two ice sculptures and ten bridesmaids in turquoise dresses, will be a piece of
cake, five layers high with a plastic staircase and a fountain of champagne.
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