Shawnee Smith

If you think about it, Chainsaw and Dave would be jealous of her current career as a Scream Queen. She had arguably the most nuanced role in Summer School, as a sensitive girl of average intelligence whose grades plummeted because of a teen pregnancy. She’s seldom the focus of the story, but she gets a few moments that let us see her wry wit about her current situation and her clear awareness that this is not the way she wanted things to be. I’ve never seen a Saw, on the grounds that I wouldn’t like it, but she’s definitely a major part of its complicated lore. It’s quite a change for a woman whose first film role was as a singing, dancing orphan.

Smith actually got started in commercials, like many other actors, and then there was Annie. She did stage, catching the attention of Richard Dreyfuss in a production of To Gillian on Her 37^th Birthday. Then came Rhonda and Summer School. Perhaps at least as significantly, there came The Blob. This remake of the ‘58 cult classic had a considerably more bonkers cast. Perhaps it didn’t have an equivalent of Steve McQueen, but it did have Smith, Kevin Dillon, and Paul McCrane? (Jack Nance? Candy Clark? Donovan Leitch Jr.?) Clearly, Smith had found her future.

She has also done more than a few miniseries and made-for-TV movies of the thriller variety. She tried to kill Rob Lowe in The Stand and had a minor role in the King-written version of The Shining. She appeared with Candace Cameron and a couple of Carradines in I Saw What You Did and has been in things with titles like Secrets of an Undercover Wife and Face of Evil (with Tracey Gold!). It’s a clear switch from the sweet-faced girl in Who’s Harry Crumb?

What astounds me most, honestly, is how often she seems to be in various people’s bottom-of-the-barrel projects. You think to yourself, “Oh, something called Female Perversions is probably awful. Wait, it stars Tilda Swinton, Clancy Brown, and Marcia Cross? Desperate Hours, barely breaking five stars on IMDb! Oh, my, it’s a forgotten Michael Cimino project starring Mickey Rourke, Mimi Rogers, and Sir Anthony Hopkins.” Pretty much everything you click on has surprised like that. It’s kind of amazing.

Sure, there’s some normal stuff in her career. An episode of Murder, She Wrote. The episode of The X-Files that was the only one playing whenever a friend from high school decided to watch the show. Two seasons of the Charlie Sheen vehicle Anger Management, if you can even consider that normal. She played Ted Danson’s character’s assistant on Becker for something like six seasons. She even did an episode of Kim Possible playing an extremely minor character. Mostly, though, she’s another one of the “I can’t believe I hadn’t gotten to them yet” people of October.