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Cailee Spaeny’s Role in The Craft’s Feminist Reboot Couldn’t Be More Perfectly Timed

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When Cailee Spaeny got the phone call to say she’d been cast as the lead in the follow-up to ’90s cult classic The Craft, her excitement was tempered by one thing only—as a self-confessed horror movie wimp, she’d never actually seen the original film. “I have the same three horror films I’ve seen in my life and I just keep watching them over and over again, so I don’t seem like a big baby in front of my friends,” she says, laughing. “I’d never seen The Craft, which is slightly embarrassing, but I did force myself to watch it after that and it was so iconic. I understood right away why it was so close to people’s hearts.” 

Spaeny does note, however, that whenever she told friends of a certain generation about her role in the film, their response was near-universal: “You can’t mess this up.” An intimidating start to a project, surely? “I do genuinely think it was really revolutionary for a genre film, though,” Spaeny adds. “I was watching the original Halloween recently, and I was like, this movie is horrible for women—it’s so offensive! So to make a movie at that time with women in all their power, who were both the good guys and the bad guys, that touched on racism and sexual assault and was led by women, is amazing.” As Spaeny describes it, the impetus for reimagining the story—here titled The Craft: Legacy and directed by Zoe Lister-Jones—was to highlight the original’s obvious resonance with young women today, while at the same time updating it to feel firmly of the moment.

Spaeny is talking over Zoom from Philadelphia, where filming on her upcoming HBO series Mare of Easttown starring Kate Winslet has resumed after an eight-month hiatus. “It’s been a bit wild. I worked like a 14 hour day yesterday and did a nude scene for the first time ever. I haven’t seen these people in eight months, and now I’m naked in front of them,” Spaeny adds, laughing again. “It’s all very strange, but I’m happy to be working again.”

She certainly deserved the break: looking at Spaeny’s packed release schedule over the past few years, it seems there’s barely been a minute she hasn’t been working. Since her breakout role in Guillermo del Toro’s 2018 Pacific Rim sequel, Spaeny has racked up appearances in the neo-noir thriller Bad Times at the El Royale opposite Dakota Johnson, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s daughter Jane in On the Basis of Sex, and as a young Lynne Cheney in Adam McKay’s political satire Vice. Most recently, she won critical acclaim for her turn in Alex Garland’s sci-fi series Devs playing a male coder working in a secretive division of a shady tech company. 

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Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Despite this impressively versatile roster, Spaeny’s role in The Craft: Legacy—the first film in which she was very much the lead actor—was a new challenge, with the story pitching to a different audience closer to her own generation. (It’s also her second film with a female director at the helm, notable only for the fact that many actors with decades in the industry have yet to work with even one.) The women-led crew is something Spaeny feels is reflected in the spirit of the film, which sees the young witches use magic to challenge toxic masculinity and the patriarchy with razor-sharp wit. “I love what Zoe did by using this cult classic as a blueprint to explore young women’s issues today,” Spaeny explains. “There’s a strong sense of inclusivity, and I think the nice thing about this film is that it’s not about women turning on each other. I think we have enough of those stories right now.”

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