Ahead of the release of Britney Spears’ memoir The Woman in Me on Tuesday, the Daily Mail has acquired and shared a piece of film that’s become the stuff of Hollywood legend: Spears’ audition tape for The Notebook, the hit blockbuster that ended up starring Rachel McAdams as Allie, a wealthy heiress who falls for Ryan Gosling’s penniless heartthrob Noah.
In the clip, Spears convincingly breaks down as she tells an off-camera Gosling, as Noah, that part of her wishes he had died in the war so she wouldn’t ever have to see him with someone else.
“For seven years, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get you out of my mind,” Spears sobs, “and then I met Lon, and I told him I’d marry him. And I wanna marry him, I really do. But then I saw your picture in the paper and I knew I had to see you again because we never really finished things, not really.”
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The Notebook’s casting director Matthew Barry told the Mail that Spears’ audition—which was logged in 2002 when the star was 21 years old and fresh off her breakup with Justin Timberlake—“blew us all away. Our jaws were on the floor. I was blown away. Absolutely blown away. She brought her A game that day.”
Barry said that all the actresses who auditioned for Allie were told to play off the same scene, in which Allie agonizes to Noah that she doesn’t know if she should marry him or Lon, the class-appropriate choice, played by James Marsden. The casting director emphasized that Spears’ take on the scene was so good, she beat out fellow young stars Scarlett Johansson, Claire Danes, Kate Bosworth, Amy Adams, Jamie King, and Mandy Moore for the role, before a luminous McAdams ultimately snagged the brass ring.
In already-released excerpts from her memoir, Spears revealed that she was grateful the role ultimately went to someone else.
“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,” she writes in The Woman in Me. “If I had, instead of working on my album In the Zone I’d have been acting like a 1940s heiress day and night.”
