Casting. One of the most important, frustrating, and frightening parts of the filmmaking process. If you’re an actor, it’s a constant state of vulnerability, being compared and contrasted to scores of other candidates, each being nitpicked on their appearance, experience, and performance. On the production side, you sift through an endless slog of headshots and self-tapes hoping to find that one person who fits exactly the character you have in your head. And the stakes? Just the entire production. The fortunes of movies, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars, can be made or lost during casting. 

Think of what life would be like if Burt Reynolds had played Michael Corleone in The Godfather instead of Al Pacino, or if Nicolas Cage wielded the Sword of Elendil as Aragon instead of Viggo Mortensen in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, or if Mel Gibson and not Michael Keaton had donned the cape and cowl in Tim Burton’s Batman? Probably worse in all three timelines but, at the very least, pop culture would be entirely different.   

It’s difficult to find the right actor even during the best of times, but when you’re an indie production trying to find a teenager who can pull off childlike, seductive, bratty, calculating, and lethal in a movie where she plays a character who murders her mother and has an affair with her father…it can feel nearly impossible. 

That’s where the filmmakers behind the 1998 Sundance smash Wicked found themselves at the beginning of the search for Ellie Christianson. It was a daunting task upon which rested the film’s prospects for success. Fortunately, there was one fifteen-year-old in New York who felt she just got Ellie. That was Julia Stiles. The teenage thespian began her career at eleven when she joined the experimental La MaMa Theatre Company. She made her TV debut in 1993 with the PBS children’s mystery show Ghostwriter and later guested on Promised Land and Chicago Hope. Stiles’ big screen bow came opposite Claire Danes and Jude Law in the romantic drama I Love You, I Love You Not and she subsequently played Harrison Ford’s daughter in the thriller The Devil’s Own, which also starred Brad Pitt. These early roles provided indispensable experience for the young actor, but she had never carried a movie before. 

Below, watch Julia’s audition tape and read producer Frank Beddor and director Michael Steinberg remember the process that led them to the future star of 10 Things I Hate About You and Save the Last Dance. 

(The following content has been taken from the “Wicked” Press Kit)

“The only condition Frank and I set in advance of making the picture was that we had to find the right Ellie,” said Steinberg. “I wanted an actress as close as possible to Ellie’s actual age. Ideally, she’s about 13 or 14 and I refused to have her played by a 26-year-old in pigtails.”

“I was very concerned,” remembered Beddor. “We didn’t have the time or the resources to do a national search for an actress to play Ellie. But luck had it that I was helping to produce a short film for acting coach Larry Moss and his DP recommended a young actress. This was the first I had heard of Julia Stiles. But based on this DP’s enthusiasm I sent a copy of the script to her new manager and Fed-Exed a copy to her in New York City.”

“A short time later we received a faxed letter from Julia,” added Steinberg. “It was hand-written and said she had read the script and felt she understood Ellie. She also sent an audition tape of herself with NYC background sounds running lines from the script with her mother. We liked her.”

“I flew her out to LA and she stayed at her manager’s house,” recalled Beddor. “Julia and I started improvising scenes for Michael and we knew - she was Ellie. She also had IT. Her hair and skin, everything about her, but especially her voice. Discovering new talent is one of the pleasures of low-budget filmmaking. I sensed I had an opportunity to help launch one of the world’s rare creatures - a real movie star. I again hired European fashion photographer, Eshel Ezer, who also shot Cameron Diaz for the There’s Something About Mary campaign. This would be Julia’s first professional photo shoot.” 

Eshel recalled the shoot, “Flying back to Europe after photographing Julia I remember holding a Polaroid from one of the sets we shot and suddenly feeling overwhelmed with excitement. Looking at the picture I had shot just a couple of days earlier I was thinking about how Julia was just a kid but how strong her presence was and that she could really make it.” Beddor added, “People fell for Julia before seeing the film, this convinced me she could attract a crowd so I put her picture on the poster and her name above the title. I treated her like a star because I believed she would become one.”

Frank was right. Stiles is magnetic as Ellie. Her performance is a highwire act, a blend of strength and vulnerability that gives Ellie depth and lethality in equal measure. Stiles would go on to win Best Actress at the 1998 Karlovy International Film Festival in the Czech Republic and took Sundance by storm, prompting critic Joe Baltake to write that Stiles was “the darling of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival.” The heat generated by Wicked launched Stiles’ career, with lead roles in cult favorites 10 Things I Hate About You and Save the Last Dance complemented by scene-stealing turns in Dexter and the Bourne franchise. And it all started with a self-tape audition by a fifteen-year-old with her mom feeding her lines. 

You can watch Julie Stiles’ breakthrough performance in Wicked on the following streaming platforms: Amazon, YouTube, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, PLEX, and Tubi.

John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.