Why did Elvira reject the chance to work with Brad Pitt?
The movie business has a funny way of throwing up strange connections drenched in circumstance and coincidence, but even at that, Brad Pitt and Elvira entering each other’s orbit twice over the course of less than a decade is fascinating, given how the former ended up reaching superstardom.
Having become an instant cult favourite as the host of Movie Macabre with Elvira, Mistress of the Dark during its run on the small screen between 1981 and 1986, Cassandra Peterson’s eccentric and iconic alter ego was rewarded with her own feature film two years later. Simply titled Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, the horror comedy finds the title hero heading to a small town following the death of her great aunt, where she ends up teaching her deceased relative’s children all about the magic of horror cinema.
One of the youngsters was played by Kris Kramm, and as was revealed in the behind-the-scenes documentary in the Arrow Video home release of the film, he beat out future superstar Pitt to land the part: “In the casting, there was this beautiful young man,” he said. “In my head, I was thinking well, if they want to go pretty, that’s what they’re gonna go with. If they want to go with an actor, they’ll go with me.”
Of course, Pitt was a relative unknown at the time, and it wasn’t until years later that the truth was revealed. “One evening I saw Cassandra and her then husband Mark [Pierson], who produced it, they were sitting outside having dinner,” he explained. “Cassandra said, ‘It came down between you and one other actor for the role of Randy. Had the other actor gotten it, my movie would’ve been a huge international hit.’ I was like, ‘Who was it?’ She’s like, ‘Brad Pitt.’”
With his looks proving to be a hindrance for once, Peterson admitted that the fresh-faced Pitt was simply too good-looking to convincingly play an average teenager: “I said to everybody in casting, ‘There is no way in hell that Elvira is going to be in a room with that kid and still like Bob. She is going to be after him and that will not be good.’ He was 20-something but in the movie he’s playing underage so it wouldn’t be good.” Then again, that didn’t prevent her from scribbling “yum yum” in her notes during the casting process.
Having crossed paths once already, Pitt and Elvira took their unlikely relationship to the next level in 1994 when she sold him a mansion for $1.7 million. This being the Mistress of the Dark, though, she did make a point of warning the prospective buyer that the property was haunted: “We were just kind of warning him that a lot of weird things have been going on there in the house since we moved in. And he was very excited about that. He thought that was really cool.”
Telling the person who wants to buy your home that it contains pre-existing residents from the spirit world may not be the most dynamic sales pitch, but Peterson did acknowledge to People that even though she knows “that sounds nutty,” she’s Elvira: “You expect that from me, right?”
Seeing as Pitt ended up selling it on for almost $40m three decades later, Elvira inadvertently and unexpectedly ended up having a massive say in the A-lister’s personal and professional futures twice over.
