"There are more female creators, and women are allowed to have emotions that go beyond gentle smiles," she said. Today, Donahue is heartened by the changes in the industry since The Blair Witch Project hit theaters in 1999. "That those kids are actually dead, and Josh, Mike, and I were hired so they could get away with releasing it as a film." "There are still people who think that me, Mike, and Josh are actors that were hired to cover up that The Blair Witch Project was actually a snuff film," she marvels.
Cast of the blair witch project 1999 movie#
And all along, that revolutionary marketing had worked a little too well in the midst of the ongoing debate over whether the events of the movie had actually happened, her mother received a sympathy card from a distant relative who believed The Blair Witch Project was real. She "won" Worst Actress at the Razzie Awards-a ridiculous sham of an anti-Oscars ceremony, but an experience she says "still sucked" as a young actress who felt totally unprepared for how enormous the movie had become. But what you get for that is, 'Oh, that annoying bitch wouldn't turn the camera off.'"Īs the enthusiasm over The Blair Witch Project's uniqueness curdled into irritation at its cultural ubiquity, people began turning on the movie-and Donahue, whose face had become the lynchpin of the marketing campaign, endured much of the backlash. Find me the woman who would have believably kept that camera running. "I feel incredibly proud of my work in that movie creatively," she says. The problem, as it turned out, was that the verisimilitude required to sell the performance made it hard for a portion of the audience to separate Heather Donahue the Actress from Heather Donahue the Character-and more to the point, made it hard for a potion of the audience to appreciate how much work Donahue had put into crafting a protagonist so obsessed with chronicling the Blair Witch that she wouldn't turn the camera off. But we're like war buddies now, you know? We've come through this experience together." We were cast because there was inherent conflict in the group. "We weren't cast because we'd be lifelong friends. "We were cast, I think, because the three of us are so different," she said. (Of the three stars of The Blair Witch Project, only Leonard is still a working actor Williams is now a middle-school guidance counselor.) Though they weren't particularly friendly at the time, they've come to bond over their strange shared experience in the years since. But how could I say no to improvising an entire feature-without a stitch of makeup, with layers of clothes, and dirt, and knives-and nothing but a pile of rocks to scare you with?"ĭonahue's mother received a sympathy card from a distant relative who believed The Blair Witch Project was real.ĭonahue was cast in the movie that would eventually be titled The Blair Witch Project opposite Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams, two similarly unknown and similarly committed actors. How could I say no to that? Nobody wanted me to go into the woods with a bunch of strange guys. But that was the thrill! The fuck-you thrill of it. I was the most unfuckable ingenue to ever be in a blockbuster. "No ingenue was willing to be so unfuckable. "No size-8 woman was playing the lead in dirty jeans, with no mascara, with unwashed hair," she said. And none of it will ever be the first line of my obituary."īut when the subject turned to the brilliantly calibrated performance that actually made The Blair Witch Project such a success, her tone brightened.
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Cast of the blair witch project 1999 tv#
I've done all these things since: I've published a book, I've grown weed, I've produced this independent TV pilot. "Like, what am I going to do to surpass that? That will always be the first line of my obituary, no matter what else I do. "It's quite a thing to crawl out from under: To have your obituary actually written when you’re 24, in both literal and figurative ways," she said. This week, when I asked her the same question, she got philosophical.
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Back then, when I asked her how she felt about The Blair Witch Project after so much time had passed, she told me her feelings were in flux almost every day.