Even though it’s been 20 years since the release of “She’s All That,” Jodi Lyn O’Keefe, who played resident mean girl Taylor Vaughan, still remembers every detail of filming one of the movie’s most iconic scenes.
“[The prom scene] felt like ‘Groundhog Day,’ like we never actually left a prom because we were there for so many days in a row,” O’Keefe told Page Six in a recent interview. “I think by the time we were all done with that scene, if we never heard ‘Funk Soul Brother’ again, we’d be OK. By the end of it, not one of us could stand hearing that song anymore because we just heard it over and over and over and over again for the longest time.”
O’Keefe, 40, says listening to the Fatboy Slim song now brings her right back to that moment 20 years ago, adding she thinks she could still do the choreographed dance that goes along with it.
O’Keefe, who was 20 years old at the time, remembers little from her audition for the film, only the feeling of “pure terror.” Even though she’d been on “Nash Bridges” for a couple years, “She’s All That” was only her second movie.
But the minute she got into the room with director Robert Iscove, the fear melted away. “I remember he was so lovely to me and I thought if only every audition could be like this for the rest of my life, that would be great,” she said.
After she was cast, O’Keefe, who was new to Los Angeles at the time, vividly remembers getting lost on her first day on set.
“It was like an adventure trying to get to work any day I had to go for the first few years I was here,” she said, adding that when she finally did arrive, she was giddy to be there alongside cast members Rachael Leigh Cook, Freddie Prinze Jr., Matthew Lillard, Gabrielle Union and Lil’ Kim.
O’Keefe also opened up about working alongside Paul Walker, who passed away in 2013 after a tragic car accident.
“He was so lovely and so charming and so sweet and such a gentleman,” she recalled. “And he could do no wrong as far as I was concerned back then. We kind of all swooned over him on a daily basis.”
The movie, which was shot all over LA, took a few months to film, and at the end, O’Keefe said, she was sad it was over.
“It just seemed like such a beautiful moment for all of us. We had such a good time,” she said, adding that the biggest lesson she learned on the set was to “be present and stay in the moment because it’s gone in a blink, it’s over before you know it.”
O’Keefe went on to have a lengthy résumé following “She’s All That,” including playing Gretchen Morgan on “Prison Break” and Dr. Jo Laughlin on “Vampire Diaries,” which she recently reprised on the CW spin-off “Legacies.”
At the moment, the actress is gearing up for pilot season, hoping to land her next big role. But let’s be honest, O’Keefe could still win the prom in fluorescent lighting, on the first day of her period, cloaked in tacky rags.
The cast of ‘She’s All That’ 20 years later:
