Neve Campbell turned her back on Hollywood over Scream fame

Neve Campbell in Scream (Credit: Dimension Films)

It might have been a pivotal moment in the horror genre, but for Neve Campbell, it was Scream that made her turn her back on Hollywood.

Campbell took the lead in the 1996 movie – after the shock despatching of considerably larger star Drew Barrymore in the opening scenes – a breakthrough role which should have cemented her place in the movie business.

But instead, she retreated from the spotlight.

“I needed a minute. In my 20s, it all hit so fast and so big that it was a little overwhelming,” she told Stephen Colbert.

“Wonderful, obviously, and I’m very grateful for it, but it got to a level, also, where the kinds of things that I was being offered were not the things I wanted to do.

“I was constantly being offered horror because I was known for horror or bad romantic comedies.

“I just wasn’t interested in the scripts and I was feeling a bit unhappy with the things that were coming to me and I was feeling a little bored of the whole thing and I thought, ‘I want a change.’”

Still, she appeared in Scream 2, Scream 3 and Scream 4, playing Sidney Prescott, but despite other hits like The Craft and Wild Things, her trajectory was not quite as stratospheric as it might have been, with a handful of years where she didn’t release a movie at all.

In recent years, she’s appeared as LeAnn Harvey in House of Cards, and is next up in Skyscraper, the Die Hard-esque disaster movie with The Rock.

It’s out now across the UK.

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