Tyra Banks was promised Josh Hartnett's career if she took a role in Halloween: Resurrection

By 2002, Banks’ burgeoning acting career hadn’t exactly been the barnstormer one might have expected after her debut in John Singleton’s 1995 social drama Higher Learning. After taking a role in the 1999 French Stewart vehicle Love Stinks, Banks’ star finally hit an ascent in 2000 with appearances in buzzy films like Love & Basketball and Coyote Ugly, which, according to her agent at the time, meant it was time for the model to strike the horror genre while the blue steel was hot. After all, taking a role in a post-Scream Halloween feature worked so well for Josh Hartnett, the agent reasoned—career advice that worked so poorly for Banks that the supermodel declined to name him in her EW conversation. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to do that,'” she said. “What is it going to do for my career? I’m a model, and I need to do things that are kind of different to get this acting career that I want […] He was like, ‘No, Josh Hartnett did Halloween, and look what he’s doing now!'” Presumably, the agent in question then gestured at a billboard for Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, but we can never truly know. 

Charitably speaking, Halloween: Resurrection was not the hit its predecessor was. Boasting marquee-busting ringers such as rapper Busta Rhymes and Rookie Of The Year‘s Thomas Ian Nicholas, Resurrection came four years after the release of Halloween H20: 20 Years Later and netted half of that film’s worldwide take, despite dropping during a similar summer release window and featuring the franchise’s ultimate Final Girl, Jamie Lee Curtis, in a shitty cameo. Yet, even with the benefit of hindsight, when one tilts one’s head to view the agent’s rationale, Banks appearing in a hot horror series does make a kind of sense. “I was like, yeah, okay, this is going to do it for me,” she said, before immediately confirming the opposite. “Not only did it not do anything for me, they cut the damn death scene.”

“[I was] promised the career of Josh Hartnett, of an actor, and promised an iconic death scene that will last forever, and neither of them happened,” she laughs. “So, I have beef with Halloween 8!” Considering she’d go on to host the real-world reality series America’s Next Top Model one year later, we’d say the dubious honor of appearing in Resurrection might have been a blessing in disguise.