Kristen Stewart almost bit her lip and the dust as the “Drew Barrymore” of Scream 4
Kristen Stewart turned it down and another star from a Vampire-based touchstone took the gig
[This article discusses the plot of the Scream series]
The Scream series first grabbed the world’s attention with an iconic opening sequence that sacrificed the film’s biggest star. Director Wes Craven’s gamble paid off, and critics praised his Hitchcockian bait-and-switch, which would become a lynchpin of the franchise.
Some opening kills fared better than others, though. Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett Smith make a four-course meal out of their date-night trip to a raucous screening of Stab in Scream 2. However, Scream 3’s Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), stuck in L.A. traffic as Ghostface murders his partner over the phone, yields less exciting results.
By the time Craven got to Scream 4, he knew that audiences were way ahead of him, so he and screenwriter Kevin Williamson went full-on meta, faking audiences out with faux-Scream openings via the in-universe Stab franchise. But it wasn’t always this way.
In a recent interview with Slant Magazine, queen of the vampires herself Kristen Stewart revealed that she was almost Scream 4's “Drew Barrymore,” its first scene casualty. However, she passed because she “can’t do a Drew.”
“It was just going to be one person, and I was like, ‘I can’t do a Drew. I can’t touch that,’” she said. “Then they ended up doing, if I’m remembering correctly, a larger sequence and not just one victim.”
K-Stew’s memory serves her well. For Scream 4, Craven and Williamson staged a more extensive, multi-part sequence featuring one Kristen and one Vampire-adjacent celebrity: Kristen Bell and Anna Paquin.
That doesn’t mean Stewart’s Scream days have come and gone. On the contrary, there’s still hope as long as Kristen Stewart continues to love Neve Campbell and Scream.
I would read the script. I love Neve Campbell so much. She was very nice to me, and it was very satisfying that she’s a very nice person. I love that movie. I’ve watched it recently, as an adult though. It’s so gnarly. I love the movie because it loves movies. The coolest part of Scream is what it says about film. It’s so self-aware. It folds in on itself like six times. I love how much [Wes Craven] loves movies and how embedded that is. It’s a total film nerd type of movie. It’s not just a flasher flick. It’s a beautiful movie. It’s so hard to watch. I’m like, “I don’t have the stomach for that shit anymore.” I was like, “Oh, man, this is very, very, very intense.”