The role that sent Alicia Silverstone into career exile: “I went to Africa”
Actors can come and go, but the work they leave behind in the public domain means they are set in stone for some generations of audiences. For a certain demographic of 1990s kids, Alicia Silverstone was a mainstay of the film.
Although she might have been known for her iconic turns in movies like Clueless, some of her first big breaks came in the form of music videos, where she played the love interest in Aerosmith’s music videos for ‘Cryin’, ‘Crazy’ and ‘Amazing’. As the times started to change, what could have been Silverstone’s biggest break yet turned into a disaster from the word go.
In the wake of Clueless becoming a global hit, Silverstone started to get recognised as something more than just ‘The Aerosmith girl’, which, by her own admission, didn’t make her feel very comfortable. When talking to People magazine after the fact, Silverstone talked about being unequipped from fame at the time, saying, “It was very complicated, and I don’t think I knew how to manage it: I didn’t have the foundation, the good tools to deal with it, I wasn’t prepared for it in any way, shape or form. I really had no idea what was happening, and it didn’t feel comfortable”.
Around the time Clueless was being made, Joel Schumacher was helming his own version of the Batman franchise. Being completely removed from Tim Burton’s dark imagining of the character, Schumacher’s take was much more lighthearted and leaned into the campiness felt in Adam West’s television show. While superstar George Clooney was cast as The Caped Crusader, Silverstone was cast as Barbara Gordon, who would eventually turn into Batgirl.
Though the movie was meant to be lighthearted, it ended up the laughing stock of comic book movies for years, with fans pointing out everything from the anatomically correct Batsuits to the overabundance of ice-based puns courtesy of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr Freeze.
Not even the entire cast was impressed with what the movie became, with Clooney being outspoken about how over-the-top the movie looked in retrospect. While each of the cast recovered from the movie nicely, the only exception was Silverstone, whose rising career immediately started to flounder.
In the wake of making the film, Silverstone got treated the harshest, ‘winning’ a Razzie for her performance and the massive flop, taking away from her other starring role in the movie Excess Baggage. The press tour also gave Silverstone some unwanted attention, with most of the questions aimed at her having to do with how much weight she put on. While Silverstone started off the decade with momentum like a rocket ship, all of the wind was taken out of her sails after her turn as Batgirl.
In the years following the cinematic disaster, Silverstone found another calling as an activist as well. When speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about her work outside the ‘90s, she mentioned reorienting her schedule based on her beliefs, recalling, “I wasn’t happy, and what I did was really extract myself a bit from my acting career and went more into my activism. I went to Africa. to help the elephants, I went to Peru to try to help the rainforest. I found my passion for writing books on healing and health”.
Silverstone wasn’t blackballed out of the industry by any stretch, though. Slowly but surely, her career started to blossom again on television, earning her a Golden Globe Award for her appearance on the ABC series Miss Match. Despite sinking her reputation in the film industry, Silverstone looks back fondly on her time working alongside Clooney, saying, “Working with Michael Gough [who played Alfred] was magical. We had a very special bond. And George Clooney was so big brother-kind to me”.
Unfortunately, the movie was an unmitigated disaster on every front, with Clooney making a concerted effort in the aftermath to focus on the best projects, as opposed to the ones that would pay the most money, had the highest earning power, or gained him the most visibility.
He’s become famous for crapping all over Batman & Robin for decades, and that extends to both the film as a whole and his performance in it, which he’s been happy to remind everyone wasn’t exactly up to scratch. “With hindsight it’s easy to look back at this and go, whoa, that was really shit, and I was really bad in it,” he admitted in one interview.
“The truth is, my phone rang, and the head of Warner Bros said, ‘Come into my office. You are going to play Batman in a Batman film,’ and I said, ‘Yeah!’ I called my friends, and they screamed, and I screamed, and we couldn’t believe it! I just thought the last one had been successful, so I thought I was just going to be in a big successful franchise movie,” Clooney explained. “In a weird way I was. Batman is still the biggest break I ever had, and it completely changed my career, even if it was weak and I was weak in it. It was a difficult film to be good in. I don’t know what I could have done differently.”
