Devon Sawa: ‘I had to smoke pot in movies and be in a hip-hop video to get away from Casper’

The Nineties heartthrob made teenage hearts flutter as the human version of Casper the Friendly Ghost, then survived ‘Final Destination’ and stalked Eminem in his video for ‘Stan’. He talks to Rachel Brodsky about burnout, his TV comeback, and finally embracing his pin-up status

‘It wasn’t completely my choice to take the break. I wrestled with the idea of never acting again’ (Getty)

Can I keep you?” At 14, Devon Sawa had no idea how impactful that little bit of dialogue would become. Playing the human version of Fifties cartoon hero Casper the Friendly Ghost in the CGI-driven 1995 film Casper, the blonde, angelic Sawa only graced the screen for about five minutes. After descending a dramatic staircase, he and co-star Christina Ricci slow dance in mid-air and share a kiss. But, because IRL Casper is under a “Cinderella”-type spell, he morphs back into a spectre as the clock strikes 10. Sawa’s part was over, but those four words would haunt him for a long time.

“I had to smoke pot in movies and I had to be in a hip-hop video. That’s what I felt like I had to do to get away from ‘Can I keep you?’,” Sawa laughs over Zoom from his Los Angeles home. “Everybody wanted to hear, ‘Can I keep you?’ It drove me nuts.”

Ironically, the CGI Casper was not actually voiced by Sawa, but by an actor named Malachi Pearson. Still, the floppy haired teen’s brief appearance in the film had an enormous impact, and he was subsequently cast in a run of Nineties young adult hits. He’d reunite with Ricci in 1995’s Now and Then, a coming of age ensemble film set in small-town Indiana. Sawa, who had only been in one other movie before Casper (1994’s Little Giants), portrayed bully Scott Wormer, who strikes up a romance with Ricci’s Roberta. Infamously, it features a scene in which Sawa swims nude in a pond, inspiring a mix of fear and titillation in the film’s core group of girls, played by Ricci, Thora Birch, Gaby Hoffmann, and the late Ashleigh Aston Moore.

Between Casper and Now and Then, Sawa became a teen idol. His image was splashed across every glossy magazine, next to blond contemporaries such as Jonathan Taylor Thomas (with whom Sawa starred in the 1997 film Wild America), and the band Hanson. For a long time, he tried to run away from his heyday, but he’s since come around to embracing it. Now, he happily connects with fans on Twitter and regularly responds to Casper-related “Can I keep you?” memes.

It doesn’t hurt that Sawa is also currently enjoying something of a career reboot. In May of this year, he had a brief but memorable role romancing Jean Smart’s legendary insult comic Deborah Vance on Hacks, which follows the professional and personal relationship between Deborah and a Gen Z comedy writer (Hannah Einbinder’s Ava).

This autumn, he’ll appear on the second season of Chucky, which chronicles a fresh bout of gruesome murders committed by the titular possessed doll. “It does feel like a reboot,” Sawa says. “I haven’t really been doing anything [differently]. I just landed on a show and did what I’d been doing; I was in the right place at the right time. I needed a Chucky to get me into other rooms, like Hacks. And now with Hacks, it’s going to be even easier to get into those other rooms that I couldn’t have gotten into before.”

On Hacks’ second season, the 43-year-old Sawa taps back into his heartthrob status, playing a ruggedly handsome younger man who spends the night with Deborah, who is currently on the road testing out her new stand-up routine. The evening of no-strings lovemaking between the pair gives Deborah her sexual and comedic groove back – thus the episode’s title: “The Click.”

Devon Sawa and Jean Smart in ‘Hacks’ (HBO Max)

“At first I was a little worried because it was the part of a sexy FedEx guy,” Sawa laughs of the steamy role. “But then I read [the script], and it’s great… I don’t watch a lot of TV, but it’s one of those shows where you hear people talking about it. There’s a reason everybody watches it. It’s original.”

Sawa also confirms that, given the intimate nature of their scenes together, Smart got the sign-off on who would be cast as Jason. “We just had such great chemistry together,” he says. “I don’t know whether there was a little bit of ‘let’s cast the old Nineties heartthrob’ going on. Maybe. I don’t know. [But] it didn’t feel that way.”

On working with Smart – who last year won a Primetime Emmy for Hacks – Sawa was initially anxious due to his co-star’s many accolades. “[But] she knocked on my door the first day and said ‘welcome.’ It instantly became a comfortable work environment,” he remembers. “Sometimes you work with actors that want you to know they’re the star and you’d better stay in your place. Whereas with [Smart], it’s like, ‘Let’s take this material and play with it.’ It felt a lot like a workshop with a really talented artist.”

Sawa has been steadily working since the Nineties, save for a burnout-fueled five-year break in the mid-2000s. Since about 2010, he’s appeared on a number of middlebrow cable TV shows that ran the gamut between action-adventure scripted series and crime-drama procedurals. There was the thriller Nikita and the Hawaii Five-0, Magnum PI, and MacGyver reboots, among other things. But he’ll be the first to admit that certain doors have long been closed to him.

Following Casper, Now and Then, and Wild America, Sawa actively tried to distance himself from his pin-up tag. He took riskier roles, memorably playing Eminem’s biggest fan in the 2000 music video for “Stan”, a green-haired, acid-addled punk in SLC Punk! (1998), a lazy stoner whose hand becomes possessed by the Devil in the 1999 black comedy Idle Hands, and a high schooler trying to outrun death in the supernatural horror Final Destination (2000). Exploring darker material couldn’t stave off Sawa’s eventual industry exhaustion, though. His alcohol intake was out of control. He wasn’t asked back for the Final Destination sequel in 2003. Not long after, his agent urged him to stop working for a while.

Devon Sawa in ‘Final Destination’ (Getty)

“It wasn’t completely my choice to take the break,” Sawa acknowledges of his time away, between 2004 and 2009. “I was burnt out, I was drinking too much. I was partying too much. And so I went back to Vancouver and got sober. After a couple of years, I met my wife and we went away to southeast Asia. I wrestled with the idea of never acting again. I had started doing a little bit of real estate in Vancouver. I bought a little old building and started to renovate it myself.”

Things changed for Sawa when he received a script in the mail for the video game thriller Max Payne (2008), which starred Mark Wahlberg. “I don’t know who didn’t get the memo that I was not in the business anymore, but I decided to put myself on tape for it,” Sawa says. “And the casting [office] called back – they really liked me for it.” Ultimately, Sawa didn’t get the role, but his audition opened up a new chapter for his acting career. “All of a sudden I had a new manager and I thought, ‘Let’s give it another shot,’” he says. “I felt like I had a reset.”

You don’t need to make money out of your kids

While that chain of events might sound immediate, it took work to convince the industry that he’d matured. “The doors didn’t open very quickly,” he says. “There was a lot of, ‘Oh, I remember he didn’t show up to the audition because he was partying the night before,’ or whatever it was.”

Sawa says he has a “special place in his heart” for the Nikita producers, who hired him to play the role of secret agent Owen Elliott in 2010. In 2012, he was promoted to series regular on the series. “I’ve worked with some great directors and phenomenal writers, but I had a chance to show the industry that I could get to set every day for four years,” Sawa says. “It was a chance to really showcase that I was a different person.”

Sawa also strives to course correct with his two kids, Hudson, eight, and Charlotte, six. “My daughter, I think, has the actor buzz in her,” he says. “She has comedic timing and she has levels. I’m never gonna get her an agent or anything, but it’s really weird to see that she’s got this little performer in her.”

Devon Sawa and Christina Ricci in ‘Casper’ (Universal Pictures)

He continues: “Whenever parents ask about advice for their children, who they want to be actors, I always tell ’em what I’m sure they don’t want to hear: keep them out of the film business. If they wanna act, put ’em in theatre, put ’em on the stage. They don’t need to be paid. And then, four, five, six years later, if they’re still showing as much interest and passion, maybe revisit. You don’t need to make money out of your kids.”

Now that his own career reboot is firmly back on the upswing, Sawa has a great deal more gratitude for the opportunities that come his way. “It feels a lot different now,” he says. “When I was doing Final Destination, I didn’t appreciate anything. I’d been doing it for so long that [I thought], ‘This is just the way it is and it’s always gonna be this way.’ Now I’m at a place where I’m on Hacks, and I love that. And I love that I’m on Chucky. I appreciate it more.”

‘Hacks’ can be streamed in the US on HBO Max, and season two arrives in the UK via Prime Video on 10 June