Rachel True on playing Rochelle (2021)

Rachel True, interviewed by The A.V. Club, 2021, on playing Rochelle Zimmerman in The Craft (1996).

Good for

An actor's account of a character being rewritten around her casting — one of the clearest production-history cases in the wiki of Values entering a film through who gets hired.

What she actually says

The racism storyline was not in the script she auditioned with:

The character was also originally bulimic, by the way, and my first audition was an "I threw up today" kind of monologue. Then they hired me and switched [my story] to being about racism.

On playing the spell that makes Laura Lizzie's hair fall out — the moment her performance departs from the other three:

Everybody else was gleeful and cackling when their wish came true.

Rochelle had that moment because she's Black, unlike the other three witches, where she thought, "Oh, shit. I have really, physically hurt someone and I'm a little freaked out."

On what the part meant:

Sometimes I think that even my costars don't understand what that role at that time represented for Black women and girls.

She was also older than the role and hiding it: "I was lying about my age so hardcore, it was like I was leading a double life."

Use with care

This is testimony given twenty-five years after the fact, by someone with a stake in how the film is remembered — and it is corroborated by what is on screen, which is the test that matters. See Rochelle plays the spell wrong on purpose.