It was while they were still young and practicing their, ahem, craft…
With hindsight Jolie, especially, seems like she would have been perfect for the movie. But this was 1996, so it still two years until she would unleash the full range of her ability to play extremely troubled characters in Gia and Playing By Heart during her breakthrough year of 1998.
However, she was pipped to the post at the time by another rising star, Neve Campbell who was riding high in Party of Five.
We still wish we had seen Jolie as a furious, vengeful teenage witch, though.
The movie was The Craft and it eventually starred Fairuza Balk, Robin Tunney, Neve Campbell, and Rachel True.
Casting director Pam Dixon told EW: “We tested over 90 girls and went through probably 600. But [Neve] was by far the biggest name.
“We tested Alicia Silverstone, Scarlett Johansson, Angelina Jolie… but Neve came in and she was really, really good.”
Perhaps things might have been different, if they had known that Jolie would become notorious for wearing a vial of Billy Bob Thornton’s blood around her neck a few years later.
The movie was not expected to do well by the studios and was viewed as a risk due to its female-centric characters and challenging themes of pagan worship, rape and murder.
Both Columbia Pictures and the censor believed it was too strong for female teenage audiences who had flocked to see Clueless the year before. They were wrong.
Despite receiving a resticted R rating in the US it was the top film in its week of release.
Director Andrew Fleming said: “The rating was a surprise because we actually sent the script to the MPAA for rating in advance, and we had held off on any really hard language or nudity or graphic violence because we wanted a PG-13. They said, ‘This is an R.’ When we asked why, they said, ‘Because it’s about devil worship and teens and we don’t want to encourage that.’”