This ^^ is a photo of Angelina Jolie in 1996’s Foxfire, the story about five teenage misfits who gang together to take down the man who has harassed them. Foxfire was the film where Angelina met and fell in love with Jenny Shimizu, incidentally. It was also the film Angelina did instead of The Craft!! For ‘90s girls like me, The Craft is a pretty big deal. Personally speaking, Clueless was always a bigger deal for ME, but I did enjoy The Craft. The Craft is also a story of a gang of misfit girls banding together… but they banded together for witchcraft! The iconic ‘90s film starred Robin Tunney (in the lead role), Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell and Rachel True. The film turns 20 years old this year, and to celebrate, HuffPo did interviews with original cast members, producers and the director, Andrew Fleming. Fleming said that Angelina was very close to being cast in the lead role, which went to Robin Tunney. That’s what’s shocking to me, that Jolie read for Sarah and not Nancy (played by Fairuza Balk).
You may not be able to picture The Craft with a different group of teen witches, but that was almost the case when putting the coven together. During an interview with The Huffington Post to celebrate the cult classic’s 20th anniversary, casting director Pam Dixon and director Andrew Fleming revealed that the famous 1996 flick almost starred some now-huge A-listers, including Angelina Jolie, Alicia Silverstone and Scarlett Johansson. And they all went for the same part—Sarah, the lead role.
“We did these tests and we tested a lot of girls, some of whom have become really well-known,” Dixon shared. “We actually had a hold on somebody that we had to let go because she got offered another film, and we didn’t know if the movie was really happening. That girl was Angelina Jolie. She did Foxfire instead.” Oh, whaaaaat?
She continued, “Another person who came in was Scarlett Johansson, who was just 12 at the time. The other girl was Alicia Silverstone. This would have been ‘95. She had just shot Clueless, but it had not come out. Alicia also got something between the time that we read them and the time we were really going to make the movie, so we couldn’t pick her up either and she went to do something else. They were all really for Sarah.”
The lead role obviously ended up going to Robin Tunney, who actually auditioned for a smaller part in the film. “Robin was originally cast in the part that Neve Campbell played, but we wanted her for the lead. We had to talk her into playing the lead, which was weird. But she did it. She wanted to play Bonnie, and we said, ‘No, we want you to be Sarah.’ It was like a reverse-Hollywood story where she wanted the smaller part.”
I could see how Alicia Silverstone would be in contention for the middle-of-the-road Sarah role, and I could also see how Angelina would have been outright offered the lead or any role in the film. But Angelina would have been better as Nancy. Perhaps they already had Fairuza at the time and they just wanted Sarah to be darker, thus Angelina. Because remember how Angelina was back then? She WAS The Craft. She was dark and witchy and goth and amazing. What could have been!
Photos courtesy of WENN, ‘The Craft’ and ‘Foxfire.’
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