Reese Witherspoon was the ideal actor to perform Annette Hargrove in the ‘90s teen cult vintage Cruel Intentions. Performing reverse her then-boyfriend (and foreseeable future husband) Ryan Phillippe, Witherspoon embodied Annette, a principled youthful girl who is seduced by Phillippe’s scheming Sebastian Valmont character. But if studio executives had had their way, Witherspoon may well by no means have been in the motion picture. At first, they desired Katie Holmes to play the Annette part.
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Katie Holmes was a soaring star in the past ‘90s. She acquired her large split on the hit teen drama Dawson’s Creek and also starred in the films Disturbing Habits, Go, and Instructing Mrs. Tingle. So, when producers had been hunting for anyone to participate in Annette, Holmes seemed like an noticeable prospect.
But not all people was on board with the strategy of casting Holmes, such as Cruel Intentions’ writer-director Roger Kumble.
“We received into disagreements in excess of who was going to perform Annette,” Kumble explained to Cosmopolitan in 2014. “The studio wished Katie Holmes, who was just beginning to do Dawson’s Creek. And I preferred this actor Vinessa Shaw.” (Shaw experienced a supporting job in Hocus Pocus and afterwards went on to show up in Ray Donovan, 3:10 to Yuma, and other exhibits and films.)
In accordance to Kumble, equally Shaw and Holmes were being “great.” But he was not positive the actor acknowledged for enjoying Joey Potter was the proper healthy for Annette.
“[T]his was early Katie, and I thought we required a person with a very little extra power of character,” he mentioned. “And we just could not agree.”
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Kumble’s quest for the excellent Annette inevitably led him to Witherspoon. At the time, she was dating Phillippe, who had currently been solid as Sebastian.
“And then, pretty much, I was hanging out with Ryan a single evening and I was like, ‘What about your girlfriend?’” Kumble recalled. However, as he afterwards defined to Leisure Weekly in the magazine’s oral record of the movie, the truth that she was relationship Phillippe was not why she was solid. “We knew how proficient Reese was,” he explained. “He just happened to be going out with her at the time.”
Kumble approached Witherspoon about the movie, but she was hesitant to signal on.
“So, basically, we took Reese out to dinner to get her drunk, and we ended up finding drunk,” he explained. “And I basically got down on my knees and begged her: ‘Please, it’ll be 15 days, you will be good.’”
As Witherspoon recalled to Enjoyment Weekly, acquiring her to say indeed demanded “a large amount of coercing.” But she ultimately agreed, on one issue. She required to make some alterations to Annette’s character “so she was not a doormat,” in accordance to Kumble. He agreed, and she accepted the position.
Katie Holmes’ ‘Dawson’s Creek’ co-star Joshua Jackson was in ‘Cruel Intentions’
Even though Holmes finally wasn’t solid in Cruel Intentions, just one of her Dawson’s Creek co-stars was in the motion picture. Joshua Jackson — who performed Pacey Witter on the WB collection — portrayed Sebastian’s buddy Blaine Tuttle. Blaine sleeps with Annette’s closeted gay ex-boyfriend, who is then blackmailed by Sebastian.
Jackson explained to Amusement Weekly that he relished the chance to perform a function so diverse from the ones he was ordinarily provided.
“Teenage roles were being written pretty two-dimensionally: You have been the jock or the nerd or the incredibly hot a person,” he recalled. “I was a precocious 19- or 20-year-previous who expected roles to be clever and silly and negative and amusing and about-the-top rated. [This] elevated the substance.”
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