Celebrity
Tori Spelling calls out director who left her ‘shuddering’ on set
Tori Spelling got brutally honest about working with director Chris Matheson on “Evil Alien Conquerors.”
The “Beverly Hills, 90210” star “[didn’t] even have to think twice” when asked to name the worst movie of her career on Stephen Baldwin’s “One Bad Movie” podcast earlier this week.
“It was a straight offer. I got it, and they were like, ‘It’s a comedy,’” Spelling said of the 2003 sci-fi comedy, which was written and directed by Matheson.
The film starred Chris Parnell and Diedrich Bader as two aliens who come to earth and befriend two women they believe are human, only to discover they’re aliens, too, Spelling explained.
“All I know is I had a big, furry unibrow and furry feet, and I was one of the girlfriends,” the “Scary Movie 2” actress, 53, said. “I was so excited.”
Spelling told Baldwin that the movie came on the heels of her stint on “Beverly Hills, 90210,” and she hoped it would help shake her “forever persona of being Aaron Spelling’s daughter.”
“‘Oh, this is going to be great for me,’” she remembered thinking at the time, but that wasn’t the case.
“From the moment I stepped on set, it was like I couldn’t say one word without the director being like, ‘Uh, Tori, can you do that again?’” Spelling explained, adding that she was often told to do “a little bit less” with her acting.
Despite spending 10 seasons on a drama like “Beverly Hills, 90210,” Spelling said her “comedy was on point.”
“In drama, sometimes I was like, ‘Okay, if I get that note, I understand that.’ But in comedy, no one ever gave me a note. It was always like, ‘Oh my God, that’s great. Go for it.,’” she added.
The former reality TV star explained that whether she had one line or a full paragraph, Matheson always seemed to have something to say.
Eventually, she reached a point where she would simply deliver her lines in a monotone, as if there was “nothing left there,” she said, gesturing to her face.
“It could be a scene with me and one other actor or a scene with, like, 20 of us,” Spelling recalled. “By the end, I knew he’d go through the first take and then he’d be like, ‘Cut,’ and I’m like, ‘Wait for it.’ And he’d be like, ‘Tori…’ every time.”
She said Matheson would call her out in front of the other actors and everyone else in the room. “I’d be shuddering,” she said, comparing it to getting the moves wrong in a Zumba class.
Ultimately, Spelling said she felt like Matheson “hated” her, to the point that she thought he should just fire and recast her.
“I went to set every day just, like, in a puddle of… I don’t know,” she continued. “I watched it. I’m fine in it. But I’m like, ‘Oh, I wish I’d done more with it.’ It was a comedy. It was just, like, a goofy comedy. He just didn’t like me.”
Spelling told Baldwin that her manager eventually asked for her to go uncredited. So, she said, her name doesn’t appear in the film’s credits.
Matheson, for his part, told People Saturday that he was “sorry she felt that way.”
“I like Tori personally,” he told the outlet. “I just think we have some different ideas about comedy.”
Spelling recently made headlines after her abrupt exit from “9021OMG,” the “Beverly Hills, 90210” rewatch podcast she hosted with former co-star Jennie Garth.
She broke her silence during an Instagram Live with fellow “Beverly Hills, 90210” alum Brian Austin Green last week, saying she wanted to address her exit “in a thoughtful way, rather than being reactive.”
Spelling stopped short of saying whether she plans to return to the podcast.
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