Britney Spears’s audition for The Notebook has been released for the first time after it was revealed that she narrowly missed out on the role in her memoir, The Woman In Me.
Based on the 1996 novel by Nicolas Sparks, the film, which was released in 2004, stars Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams as Noah Calhoun and Alison ‘Allie’ Hamilton, who fall in love in the 1940s.
However, before McAdams landed the part, Spears was the frontrunner to portray Allie in the romance film – and now the movie’s casting director Matthew Barry has shared her audition tape to prove the singer’s acting chops.
In the tape, recorded in Los Angeles in 2002, the Everytime singer reads an emotional scene with Gosling off camera in which Allie tells Noah she is marrying another man.
Spears begins: “I’m not staying. I tried to call you to tell you that I wasn’t going to stay – but nobody answered the phone… Noah, you can’t marry two people.
“And I’m marrying Lon, so I should go, okay?”
Becoming tearful, she adds: “I prayed for you to die in the war, really. Well, not die. I would have felt completely horrible if you would die.”
Speaking about her audition, Barry, who shared the tape with the Daily Mail, recalled: “Britney wasn’t just good, she was phenomenal.
“It was a tough decision [between Spears and McAdams]. Britney blew us all away. Our jaws were on the floor. I was blown away. Absolutely blown away. She brought her A-game that day.”
“Britney beat out several of the top female actresses at the time. Scarlett Johansson, Claire Danes, Kate Bosworth, Amy Adams, Jamie King and Mandy Moore auditioned for this role. Britney beat out all of them. Everybody who was anybody that year wanted this part.”
Spears writes about missing out on the part in her new memoir, The Woman in Me, and potentially starring her former Mickey Mouse Club co-star Gosling in the feature film.
She pens in the autobiography: “The Notebook casting came down to me and Rachel McAdams, and even though it would have been fun to reconnect with Ryan Gosling after our time on the Mickey Mouse Club, I’m glad I didn’t do it.
"If I had, instead of working on my album In the Zone, I’d have been acting like a 1940s heiress day and night."
