They may be A-list stars now, but these celebrities got their starts in some spooky (and occasionally cheesy) horror flicks.
Before Jennifer Aniston became a household name due to her success with Friends, she appeared in the 1993 film Leprechaun. The actress reflected on the role during an October 2019 interview on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show.
“I really thought I arrived when I did Leprechaun,” she explained. “It was with Warwick Davis, the guy from Willow was in it. It was a big deal!”
Aniston revisited the project during the early days of her relationship with Justin Theroux. (The pair announced their separation in February 2018 after two years of marriage.)
“I watched it, like, eight years ago with our mutual friend Justin Theroux for s—ts and giggles,” she told host Howard Stern. “We were dating. It was one of those things when I tried to get that remote out of his hand and there was just no having it. He was like, ‘No, no, no, no, this is happening.’ I just kept walking in and out, cringing.”
Despite her apparent embarrassment at the time, Aniston is happy she starred in the “cult classic” flick. “I really did think it was an amazing thing that I was in a movie,” she noted.
Of course, the California native soon after landed the iconic role of Rachel Green and has since starred in a slew of films and The Morning Show. She has also racked up plenty of accolades for her acting, including an Emmy and a Golden Globe.
Some celebrities had even more memorable experiences while working on horror films. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr., for instance, connected on the set of 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer and married in September 2002.
“By the end of the movie, I just wanted to be friends with her because I thought she was too skinny and I wanted to cook for her. Because that’s what my family does,” the actor exclusively told Us Weekly in April 2020. “And so, we started this weekly barbecue thing at her house, and me and my cousins would come over and cook food for her and her friends. And then we’d make sure everybody ate, and that was kind of how our friendship began.”
Scroll through the gallery below to see who braved the scary genre for the sake of their careers.
