As wild as it may seem, this year marks the 27th anniversary of Independence Day, Roland Emmerich’s massively successful 1996 summer blockbuster about alien invaders trying to put a stop to everyone’s Fourth of July plans. Thanks to those unforgettable action set pieces and an incredible group of actors, the movie still lives on as one of the most quintessential ‘90s movies decades after its initial release. But the Independence Day cast almost looked quite different.
In an interview with CinemaBlend ahead of the release her new true crime series, The Interrogation Room, Vivica A. Fox revealed that not only was she not the first choice for the role of Will Smith’s on-screen girlfriend and later wife, Jasmine Dubrow, she only got an audition for the now iconic part because the pregnant wife of one of the movie’s producers noticed her while watching daytime soaps:
So I remember calling my agent and going, ‘Hey, how come I'm not getting auditioned for Independence Day?’ She said, ‘Oh honey, you are just on the soap opera, you don't have a big enough name. … Thank God [Bill Faye’s] wife was at home and saw me on The Young and The Restless.
Fox had previously worked with star Will Smith (who also wasn’t the first choice) on an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in which she played a “date from Hell,” but at the time, she hadn’t really established herself in Hollywood. That being said, the future Kill Bill Vol. 1 actress had to fight hard to get the part, a process that included a total of six auditions. And while she did eventually get the role, Fox later learned that the Independence Day producers were going to fire her she wasn’t good on her first day because the original choice for the part became available:
I had no idea until the premiere when Roland Emmerich told me as we were all sitting around having dinner after the movie. He said, ‘Do you know if you weren't good, we were going to fire you?’ And I was like, ‘No, I didn't know that.’ And he goes ‘Our first choice became available, but your dailies came back, and you lit up the screen. So he was like, ‘That's our Jasmine; we made the right choice.'
Independence Day would go on to become the biggest movie of 1996, bringing in over $817 million worldwide, according to BoxOfficeMojo. It propelled its leads into superstardom, while also giving pop culture one of the most epic and iconic movie presidents (and speeches) of all time.
And while Fox, whose previous film credits included Born on the Fourth of July and Don’t Be a Menace, had no idea her spot in the cast wasn’t guaranteed, the actress knew the movie was going to be epic as soon as she walked onto the set:
We walked into the stage one day, and literally I'm just like blown away. I mean, I had never been in a movie this big. There was a spaceship on the stage. I was like, ‘DAMN, we got a lot of money.’
The size of the sets during the making of Independence Day, as well as the talented actors who appeared in the movie, helped the actress figure out that the movie was “going to be big.” And since we’re still talking about the all-time great disaster film 27 years later, she wasn’t wrong.
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If you want to revisit Independence Day in all its glory this fourth of July, you can do so right now, as the movie is streaming for anyone with a Starz subscription. And if you want to see what Vivica A. Fox is up now, check her out on the new true crime docuseries, The Interrogation Room, which debuts on free streaming platforms like Tubi, Pluto TV, YouTube and Freevee starting Saturday, July 1st.
