Hewitt initially went in to audition for the role of doomed beauty queen Helen Shivers, the part played by Gellar, who ended up being the last lead cast.
“We ended up in North Carolina, a matter of two weeks out from shooting, and we still hadn’t cast Helen,” Gillespie said. “I got it down to three girls. I had seen some of Buffy; they’d shot the pilot. [Screenwriter Kevin Williamson] liked the idea of her, which was good. So she flew down to Wilmington and to me, Sarah was it. She was absolutely it.”
But for Hewitt, “I was like, ‘It doesn’t feel like me,'” she told Entertainment Tonight in May. “They said, ‘OK, well, what do you want to do?’ I was like, ‘I want to audition for Julie James. That’s what I want to do.’ They were like, ‘OK. Well, go outside. In 10 minutes you have to come back in and audition for Julie James.’ I just knew that I was more her. When they said I got it I like lost my mind.”
Scoring her first lead role in a film, Hewitt was admittedly “terrified” of screwing up.
“I was like, ‘Am I messing up the entire movie?'” she recalled. “I couldn’t sleep [when] we were doing the first movie because I literally would be up until the middle of the night with somebody chasing me and then they’d be like, ‘OK, it’s wrap. Go home.’ How does one sleep during this process?”