George Clooney and Brad Pitt didn’t stand a chance. If you were a preteen girl in the mid-1990s with access to a VHS player and a grocery store magazine rack, Devon Sawa was the biggest star around.
Well, the second biggest.
“I knew Jonathan Taylor Thomas was edging me out because his head was always bigger” on the teen magazine covers, Sawa said.
But while Thomas was busy starring on “Home Improvement” and cornering the wisecracking, precocious kid market, Sawa was occupying a hallowed, perhaps ultimately more impactful, space as the love interest in a pair of female-centric family films.
Before girls pined for Edward Cullen or Conrad Fisher, Sawa embodied a PG-rated millennial fantasy: a nonthreatening teen boy who reverently asked Christina Ricci “Can I keep you?” (in “Casper”) and “Can I kiss you?” (in “Now and Then”).
Both of those 1995 films turn 30 this year, which means Sawa is now a respectable 47.
“There was a certain amount of years I just didn’t want to talk about it anymore,” he said of his early work. “Now, I’ve come to peace with it. It’s never going to go away.”
Sawa agreed to look back once again when we met for a recent brunch at a French bistro in Sherman Oaks, Calif., about a 15-minute drive from the Universal Studios backlot where he filmed “Casper.”
In 1994, production had already been underway on “Casper” when the producers (including Steven Spielberg) decided to add a scene in which the amiable apparition briefly comes back to life to spend a precious moment with his human friend, Kat (played by Ricci). Malachi Pearson, who voiced the C.G.I. ghost, was too young to convincingly play the human part, so the casting director Nancy Nayor undertook an extensive search for a new face.
“He had to have this delicate, lovely quality that also matched up well with Christina and her vulnerability. There had to be this almost soulful connection,” Nayor said. “Devon was that last piece of the puzzle, and it felt like the casting gods were smiling on us.”
For the then 15-year-old Sawa, who grew up in a working-class family in the Vancouver suburbs and had only acted in local Canadian productions, auditioning for and landing “Casper” was “like winning the lottery,” he said. “There was no real way into the American film market unless that tape ended up at the right place at the right time on the right desk.”
It didn’t hurt that “I was pale and blonde, and I looked a little ghostly back then,” Sawa said, reflecting between bites of French toast and sips of black coffee.
When he arrived on the “Casper” set, a hairstylist promptly took a comb and flat iron to his bowl cut and carved a sharp center part. It would become his signature hairstyle for years to come.
As Sawa and Ricci filmed their climactic scene that involved a slow dance and a kiss, “he was a total gentleman and very sweet,” Ricci said in a phone interview. “There are a lot of jerks in the world, and Devon is not one of them.”
Still, the young actors’ romantic chemistry was only onscreen. Ricci, then 14, was an industry veteran and had already earned acclaim for her roles in “Mermaids” and the “Addams Family” films. While Sawa said he “probably” had a crush on her, Ricci said she had zero interest in dating a co-star.
“At that time, I was listening to the Pixies and Fugazi, and I had declared myself as an asexual,” she said. “I was in my zone.”
When “Casper” wrapped, Sawa began booking a steady stream of Hollywood roles. At home, Sawa’s father, who was a mechanic, had discouraged him from expressing his emotions. Acting allowed the young performer to cry and explore his feelings in character. “It felt like a safe place,” Sawa said. “It was just like, I need to do this.”
Aware that Sawa and Ricci had recently worked well together, the “Now and Then” filmmakers cast Sawa in their coming-of-age tale, set mostly in the summer of 1970, about four female friends. He would play Scott Wormer, the crushworthy ringleader of a group of brothers who antagonize the girls until Scott falls for Ricci’s character, Roberta.
“We were looking for that boy that all the girls would be dreamy for,” said Suzanne Todd, who produced “Now and Then” with Demi Moore, and who would later cast Sawa in the horror comedy “Idle Hands.”
“He was great looking, but in an accessible way. Not so beautiful that girls have to be afraid.”
While filming in Savannah, Ga., Sawa and the female leads (Ricci, Gaby Hoffmann, Thora Birch and Ashleigh Aston Moore) all stayed at the same hotel, where they would play games and swim in the pool in the evenings.
Despite Todd and others recalling a contest between the female stars to compete for Devon’s offscreen affections, Ricci reiterated that she “was already too cool to have ever been a part of something like that.”
“I loved working with Devon. He was amazing,” she said. “But what dork hooks up with some kid your mother has to watch you interact with? Our parents were on set every day.”
Instead, Ricci fondly remembered Sawa teaching her and Hoffmann how to jog and joining them on trips to the local cinema for repeat viewings of “Pulp Fiction.” Sawa, meanwhile, marveled at how Ricci and Hoffmann routinely ordered clothes from the J. Crew catalog. “I thought it was so sophisticated,” he said.
More risqué was the “Now and Then” skinny dipping scene that called for Sawa to strip down and swim in a lake. The sequence is played for laughs as the girls ogle the Wormers and subsequently steal the boys’ clothes. The filmmakers intended it to be an “Oh, gross!” moment, Todd said, and they didn’t anticipate that young female viewers would find it titillating.
Yet many did, and somehow, in a largely pre-internet world, the children of America spread the rumor that if you paused that scene at just the right moment you could catch a glimpse of Sawa’s genitalia. The gossip quickly made its way back to Sawa.
“It was creepy,” he said. “It spread from mall to mall.” For years, he was “haunted” by the idea that the rumor could somehow be true, even though he’d worn a modesty garment while filming, and he said the shoot itself “felt very safe.”
Remarkably, Sawa said he never dealt with stalkers or obsessive fans during his heartthrob era. While he’s periodically peppered with requests to detail “how horrible of a childhood I’ve had,” his version of early Hollywood fame was relatively mundane.
By his late teens, he was ready to transition out of the squeaky-clean teen idol persona and into more adult projects. So, he took on starring parts in “Idle Hands,” the first “Final Destination” film and Eminem’s “Stan” music video.
As Sawa’s roles grew edgier around the turn of the century, so did his offscreen behavior.
After moving to Los Angeles by himself at 18, Sawa began going out to Hollywood clubs most nights of the week, prioritizing that scene over his career.
“I had a fake ID, and no one looked twice,” he said. “I would roll into those places in my pajamas. There’s no cellphones, so no one could record anything, and everything was going on in those clubs at the time.”
Sawa’s family had a history of addiction, he said, and in his 20s, his drinking spiraled. He wasn’t asked back for the sequel to “Final Destination” because “they thought I might be a liability,” he said.
After Sawa showed up to sets hung over and got in trouble with the law on multiple occasions, he said that his agency firmly suggested he quit acting and move back to Canada.
“Acting was always what I was going to do for the rest of my life — until it wasn’t,” he said.
Back in Vancouver, Sawa embarked on a painstaking, yearslong period of recovery. He’d already been to treatment centers, but it wasn’t until he showed up drunk to a family Christmas gathering that he was propelled to seek help for himself.
“I crawled into 90 meetings in 90 days on my own. I knew that I had to do it on my own,” he said. “Finally, like the saying goes, I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
In his early 30s, he returned to L.A., sober and ready to act again. And over the last decade and a half, he’s diligently rebuilt his career, acting on TV’s “Nikita” and “Chucky,” as well as in a string of horror and action films.
He even got back to his romantic roots with a guest role on Season 2 of “Hacks,” playing a bar patron who has a one-night stand with Deborah Vance (Jean Smart). In an HBO Max featurette about the scene, Smart quipped, “I won’t lie, it wasn’t my worst day at work.”
Sawa has now been sober for 19 years and lives with his wife, Dawni, and their two children in Bell Canyon, a scenic enclave on the outskirts of L.A.
At one point during our brunch, he removed the thick glasses that obscured his blue eyes, and boom. That poster-worthy twinkle returned. A little more wary. Lines etched, lessons learned.
“It got bumpy at times,” Sawa said, “but I think that if I wasn’t in the film business, those times would have been a lot bumpier and a lot longer.”
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