“I don’t want to do that”: The one thing Jennifer Aniston refused to do for the 1993 movie ‘Leprechaun’
Actors at the beginning of their careers aren’t really in a position to put their foot down and defy the director or producers, but Jennifer Aniston did it anyway.
With the benefit of hindsight, she might have been better off if it were non-negotiable on the filmmakers’ part, since it’s not a movie or a performance that she looks back on too fondly. Then again, what actor hasn’t made at least one embarrassing picture in their early days?
For a lot of them, it happened in horror, too. Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, and George Clooney all starred in awful slashers and/or creature features back when they were fresh-faced little cherubs, and the same was true for Aniston, who became a household name in the near future when Friends launched.
The year before she and the rest of the sitcom’s central sextet were being beamed into tens of millions of homes on a weekly basis, she made her first credited outing in a feature film as Tory Redding, the female lead of the Warwick Davis-fronted horror comedy, Leprechaun.
It was a hit, recouping its budget almost ten times over at the box office and spawning a franchise that’s either blessed or cursed the world, depending on who you ask, with another seven instalments. She’d rather not talk about it, though, with Aniston continuing to suffer from the sheer cringe factor that any mention of the B-tier caper in her presence brings on.
Director Mark Jones knew he wanted to cast her in the part, but his paymasters had a request. “We got it down to a couple of girls, and I really wanted Jennifer, but the studio wanted someone else,” he explained. “We went back and forth for a bit, and, finally, they said, ‘Well, maybe if you dyed her hair blonde’, because they wanted this California blonde kind of look.”
Jones told them that would be fine, but when he informed Aniston, who was ironically born and raised in California, of the demand, she wasn’t having it. “I called Jennifer, and I said, ‘There’s good news and bad news,'” the filmmaker recalled. “‘You’ve got the part, but the bad news is they want me to lighten up your hair.'”
Even though her entire list of credits amounted to dancing in the background of Mac and Me and a couple of TV shows, she refused: “She just went, ‘Mark, no. I don’t want to do that. I’m sorry. I don’t want to be difficult.'” Despite running the risk of angering the suits, Jones told her she didn’t have to, and she was allowed to shoot Leprechaun without a dye job.
Aniston arrived on the set for her first day of filming, and despite some trepidation on her and the director’s part, the producers who’d demanded that she turn up a bit more on the blonde side didn’t say anything, so she proceeded to shriek in terror from a man in a Leprechaun costume as planned, without having to alter her hair colour.
Based on the second-hand embarrassment that the movie continues to cause her, though, you get the sneaking suspicion that she might have preferred to have been fired over it, because the picture isn’t exactly something she’s proud of.
