The role Regina Hall wanted “really, really badly” and why she hasn’t been able to forget
While she’s had no shortage of career opportunities, Regina Hall’s biggest disappointment was getting turned down for a role in one of the strangest cult films of the 21st century.
A film’s box office is not equivalent to its quality, as there are many all-time classics like Blade Runner, The Big Lebowski, The Thing, and The Shawshank Redemption that underperformed when they first debuted in theatres. However, an initially negative reception can further ding a film’s legacy, at least until there is a generation that can stand up to reclaim it.
Josie and the Pussycats was written off as a disaster when the satirical musical hit theatres in the spring of 2001. In addition to making less than half of its budget financially, the film received scathing reviews, with Roger Ebert giving a rare ‘half star’ grade, but the unusual satire of the music industry certainly had an impact on impressionable younger viewers, in no small part due to the original soundtrack by the fictional lead band.
The film tells the story of the young bandmates Josie (Rachael Leigh Cooke), Melody (Tara Reid), and Valerie (Rosario Dawson), who are surprisingly signed to a major label by the shady promoter Wyatt Frame, played by Alan Cumming, who is working with the Megarecords CEO Fiona, played by Parker Posey. to insert subliminal messaging into pop music in order to inspire teenage listeners to engage in capitalism.
The quirky humour, unique digital techniques, and parodies of popular music groups may have baffled older filmgoers who were expecting a more traditional rags-to-riches band story, but Josie and the Pussycats developed a style of absurdism that would become more popular in the next few years, and seemingly predicted the way that comedy would look on the Internet.
While all of the performances are why the film worked so well, Hall fought hard to earn one of the lead roles, and when admitting to Collider that she wanted it “really, really badly”, she said she had learned to accept the parts that don’t come her way: “You kind of release them. You learn to do that because there really are so many that you don’t get”.
Hall was peaking in popularity at the time that Josie and the Pussycats was released, as she was coming off the success of her performances in The Best Man, Love and Basketball, and Scary Movie, and it may have damaged her career, given that the other films she had starred in were all considered hits.
While Hall has a knack for comedy that has made her an enduring figure in more light-hearted projects, learning anything about her favourite films shows that she is a true cinephile, whose range has certainly been on display more in recent years thanks to her career-defining turn in the independent comedy Support the Girls, her powerful maternal role in The Hate U Give, and her scene-stealing supporting performance in this year’s ‘Best Picture winner’, One Battle After Another.
While Josie and the Pussycats was a unique example of a film that didn’t get the backing it needed when it first came out, it doesn’t mean that actors should shy away from being in potential cult classics. In fact, Hall is at a place in her career where she could feasibly appear in some of these quirkier films, but actually manage to turn them into hits.
