Theo Kingma/REX Shutterstock, Jason Merritt/Getty Images, Evan Agostini/Invision/APRelax, it's just magic casting.
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."
The Craft centered around four teen witches—Nancy (Fairuza Balk), Sarah (Robin Tunney), Rochelle (Rachel True) and Bonnie (Neve Campbell)—who went to Catholic school and used witchcraft for vengeful acts and fixing personal problems, which oftentimes went disastrously wrong.
Producer Doug Wick also gave an update on the upcoming sequel, which Sony Pictures first announced last year, with horror director Leigh Janiak set to direct.
"It's not so much a remake — it's sort of saying young women exploring their power, what would that be like right now?" Wick explained.
"Obviously it's an incredibly relevant, exciting subject, so we hired a really great female writer/director, Leigh Janiak, who also has a talented writing partner. We were only going to explore it if there was an exciting way to go, and they came in with [something] very fresh—a new group of girls, much more of this era, who begin some explorations with power that they don't understand. They had just incredibly compelling ideas for a way to make a new, exciting, surprising movie for teenage girls."