The Fantasmas Cast Has Cruel Intentions
Sometimes when we’re feeling down, we turn to God and He helps us through it — and by God, we mean a brunette Sarah Michelle Gellar wearing a cocaine-filled rosary. On April 7 at the DGA New York Theater, Film Independent hosted a live reading of Cruel Intentions, directed by Julio Torres and starring a lineup of some of his most frequent collaborators and Fantasmas co-stars. The cast included Justice Smith as Sebastian (originally played by Ryan Phillippe), Martine Gutierrez as Kathryn (Gellar), Cristin Milioti as Annette (Reese Witherspoon), Julia Fox as Cecile (Selma Blair), and Jaboukie Young-White as Ronald (Sean Patrick Thomas). James Scully, Tomás Matos, and Amy Sedaris all played various roles, but their star turns were as Blaine (Joshua Jackson), Greg (Eric Mabius), and Mrs. Caldwell (Christine Baranski), respectively. Spike Einbinder narrated with Torres and, most important, concluded the event by assuring the audience that what they all just heard was okay because Kathryn and Sebastian are stepsiblings. Take that, Mike White.
While all but Smith and Milioti have appeared on Fantasmas, there was one glaring absence from the cast of Torres’s HBO series. The robot secretary Bibo, who in the show famously wants to become an actor himself, was completely excluded from the lineup. “If Bibo weren’t busy shooting The White Lotus season four right now, he — I mean, I don’t want Justice to hear, but he might have been the lead. He might have been Sebastian,” Torres assured us before the reading. But while we now know which Fantasmas cast members would play whom in Cruel Intentions, what about the other way around? We asked some of the cast which actors from the 1999 romantic thriller they’d like to see enter the equally surreal world of Fantasmas.
“All of them!” Torres said before choosing a standout, “I mean, Sarah Michelle Gellar in that role, specifically, as a brunette, as an evil brunette, was extremely formative to me. And I think I would love to see her be evil again.” Einbinder, who plays the superhero-obsessed Carl in Fantasmas, opted for the other half of the scheming stepsiblings, saying, “I would like to see Sebastian try to seduce and fuck Bibo. Or maybe a Carl-and-Sebastian vibe.” Finally, justice for Bibo. As for whom Scully wanted: “Joshua Jackson, and [he should do] literally anything he wants.”
Since Sedaris just shared the screen with Jackson in an episode of Doctor Odyssey, they might just have an in to make that happen. But unlike Jackson, Scully wasn’t rocking bleached-blond hair, which understandably would have been a tough move since he was set to reprise his role as Mary’s Teacher in Broadway’s Oh, Mary! the very next night. “Now that I’m deeply, earnestly, infatuously in love with Cole Escola, it’s sort of just as simple as waiting until I get to walk onstage and see Cole Escola. Then the rest of my job is very easy,” Scully said of stepping back into the role.
Without bleached hair, the reading’s fanfare-inducing highlights were Matos delivering a tour de force as closeted jock “the Gregster” as well as Fox and Gutierrez re-creating Blair and Gellar’s iconic kiss. “When I watched that when I was 10 or 11, I felt something,” Fox said about the scene before trying it herself. “That’s all I’ll say.” And it wouldn’t be Cruel Intentions without a crucifix full of cocaine and tiny little sunglasses, the latter of which ended up on Milioti as Annette drives away in the final scene of the movie, accompanied at the reading by a live performance of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” from Boy Radio. All that was missing was Phillippe’s bare ass.
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