When Sara Silva got the call confirming she had landed a role in the new Cruel Intentions TV remake in the spring of 2023, the Bay Area-raised actor was sitting at home wearing a tank top with the word “booked” etched across the front. Call it intuition. Despite going through what Silva says was “a really rough patch” battling intense imposter syndrome, not sleeping much, and “smoking a lot of cigarettes,” she couldn’t shake the feeling that the audition had gone her way.
She felt “frozen in time” waiting to actually hear the results, but all she could think about was how effortless it felt to step into the role of neurotic sorority sidekick CeCe Carroway, and how meaty the character’s on-screen future could be. And when the good news finally came through? “I was screaming and my roommates were home, and one of them found a bottle of champagne and we cheers-ed,” Silva tells Refinery29.
Cruel Intentions, which starts streaming on Prime Video on November 21, is Silva’s first major on-screen role. And if the popularity of the source material, the hit 1999 teen erotic thriller of the same name, is any indication, she couldn’t ask for a better way to start out. The film — which starred Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Reese Witherspoon, and Selma Blair — has a cult following, and is remembered for its transgressive story about a pair of wealthy stepsiblings playing manipulative, psychosexual games with each other, and just about everyone else around them, to get what they want.
In this version, stepsiblings Caroline (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Lucien (Zac Burgess) are still catty and inappropriately intimate with each other, but the plot has been reinvented and the characters are aged up to be college students, with the show adding the social politics of fraternities and sororities to the privileged mix. After a disastrous hazing incident puts campus Greek life on notice, Caroline and Lucien set out to seduce freshman Annie (Savannah Lee Smith, who also starred in the Gossip Girl TV reboot), the daughter of the Vice President of the United States, to pledge to Caroline’s sorority and save it from further scrutiny. Silva plays CeCe, Caroline’s fast-talking, desperately loyal, scene-stealing best friend and authoritarian second-in-command, who keeps the sorority running smoothly while Caroline plots and schemes.
CeCe is based on Blair’s character in the OG movie — the childish, spoiled, and inexperienced Cecile, who is targeted by the stepsiblings — and it’s not hard to spot the surface-level similarities. In fact, when Silva started the audition process, she tweeted a photo of Blair circa the late ’90s because they looked so similar. (This, Silva says, was the moment she knew the role was meant to be, and when her casting was announced, she retweeted the post as a “called it” moment.) But other than their visual likeness, Silva did not spend much time thinking about Blair’s performance — …read more
Source:: Refinery29
