{"id":360316,"date":"2025-12-21T19:59:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-21T19:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/360316\/"},"modified":"2025-12-21T19:59:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-21T19:59:08","slug":"zooey-deschanel-almost-lost-elf-role-to-different-actor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/360316\/","title":{"rendered":"Zooey Deschanel Almost Lost Elf Role To Different Actor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zooey Deschanel Almost Lost Elf Role To Different Actor<\/p>\n

Elf is, of course, a holiday classic. If you haven’t already watched it this holiday season, you’re probably about to right now.<\/p>\n

Besides being a comic powerhouse for Will Ferrell<\/a>, Elf also marked something of a breakout role for Zooey Deschanel<\/a>, who played Buddy the Elf’s love interest Jovie.<\/p>\n

Elf is one of those movies that is so beloved that just imagining a detail from the film being changed might just totally alter your perception of the movie entirely \u2014 which is why Zooey’s recent revelation that she almost didn’t star in the film at all is more than a little fascinating.<\/p>\n

Zooey said that she only locked down the role of Jovie after Katie had to withdraw from Elf due to “some scheduling conflict.”<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I met with Jon Favreau<\/a>, the director, I walked in and he was like, \u2018Oh, you don\u2019t need to read. We just offered it to Katie Holmes,\u2019\u201d she recalled. \u201cAnd I was like, \u2018Oh, OK, cool.\u2019 And he\u2019s like, \u2018Well, sit down and talk for a minute.\u2019 I was like, \u2018OK!\u2019”<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was great about that was, I wasn\u2019t nervous. When you\u2019re an actor, you\u2019re first starting, and you\u2019re auditioning, you get nervous, and you\u2019re psyching yourself up. I wasn\u2019t nervous at all, because I was like, \u2018Well, I\u2019m not getting the part.\u2019 It was kind of great ’cause I was not nervous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, if you’ve seen Elf even once, you know that Jovie’s singing talents play a pivotal role in the film \u2014 and as it turns out, that aspect of the character was tailored around Zooey’s eventual casting.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were like, \u2018Who should we have?\u2019\u201d she explained. \u201cI think the character was kind of meant to be worked around whoever played her, and they knew I sang because I had a cabaret act, so that kind of worked out with the character.\u201d<\/p>\n

That’s just the magic of the movies, folks. Happy holidays!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zooey Deschanel Almost Lost Elf Role To Different Actor Elf is, of course, a holiday classic. If you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360317,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75,337,780],"class_list":{"0":"post-360316","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-timely"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360316\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}