Idle Hands, House on Haunted Hill, Dawson’s Creek, American Pie — these are some of the projects that you’d likely have spotted the cast of the original Final Destination in before the franchise-starting movie had its date with destiny in 2000. And, while Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith, and Seann William Scott were all recognizable faces at the turn of the millennium, they weren’t quite as huge as, say, Kirsten Dunst or Courteney Cox — and that was the point. During an exciting live installment of Collider Ladies Night with Perri Nemiroff, which was preceded by a screening of Final Destination: Bloodlines, longtime franchise producer Sheila Hanahan Taylor spoke about the first casting decisions that allowed the movie to be not just entertaining but terrifyingly relatable.
When beginning to visualize and craft the harrowing story of Final Destination from script to screen, co-scribes Glen Morgan and James Wong already had an idea of the kinds of faces they’d like to see as the main set of characters, with Taylor revealing that the pair initially clashed with the studio when it came to this major decision.
“Just starting from the beginning, the conversations we were having around who the studio envisioned should be in that movie versus who we felt should be in the movie because one of the things that [Glen] Morgan and [James] Wong were bringing to the table was this level of groundedness that I think really firmly has established itself in every version of this.”
In the end, Morgan and Wong won out, with the studio allowing them to make the final decision, which, as Taylor puts it, wouldn’t see “sexy, splashy teen magazine kids” as the main characters.
“We wanted people who, when you saw a death, it really could have been you. The minute somebody super famous is in these movies, it takes you right out. So, I think just the strategy before they rolled one inch of film was really specific and really smart.”
‘Final Destination’s Final Cast
Just because they didn’t go for the biggest names of the decade doesn’t mean that Final Destination wasn’t filled to the gills with recognizable talent. By that point in his career, leading man Devon Sawa had already made a name for himself in favorites like Little Giants, Casper, SLC Punk!, and the aforementioned Idle Hands, while his co-lead, Ali Larter, appeared as a member of the ensemble in Coyote Ugly and House on Haunted Hill. Meanwhile, Kerr Smith was on TV screens every week thanks to his work in Dawson’s Creek, and Seann William Scott had become synonymous with the American Pie franchise a year earlier. In all, the casting team behind Final Destination achieved the perfect balance of just famous enough for audiences to recognize, while also still being scared to death from the title card to the credits.
Final Destination: Bloodlines is now playing in theaters. Stay tuned for more at Collider.