When Sara Silva got the call confirming she had landed a role in the new Cruel Intentions TV remake in the spring of 2023, the Bay Area-raised actor was sitting at home wearing a tank top with the word “booked” etched across the front. Call it intuition. Despite going through what Silva says was “a really rough patch” battling intense imposter syndrome, not sleeping much, and “smoking a lot of cigarettes,” she couldn’t shake the feeling that the audition had gone her way.
She felt “frozen in time” waiting to actually hear the results, but all she could think about was how effortless it felt to step into the role of neurotic sorority sidekick CeCe Carroway, and how meaty the character’s on-screen future could be. And when the good news finally came through? “I was screaming and my roommates were home, and one of them found a bottle of champagne and we cheers-ed,” Silva tells Refinery29.
Cruel Intentions, which starts streaming on Prime Video on November 21, is Silva’s first major on-screen role. And if the popularity of the source material, the hit 1999 teen erotic thriller of the same name, is any indication, she couldn’t ask for a better way to start out. The film — which starred Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Reese Witherspoon, and Selma Blair — has a cult following, and is remembered for its transgressive story about a pair of wealthy stepsiblings playing manipulative, psychosexual games with each other, and just about everyone else around them, to get what they want.
In this version, stepsiblings Caroline (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Lucien (Zac Burgess) are still catty and inappropriately intimate with each other, but the plot has been reinvented and the characters are aged up to be college students, with the show adding the social politics of fraternities and sororities to the privileged mix. After a disastrous hazing incident puts campus Greek life on notice, Caroline and Lucien set out to seduce freshman Annie (Savannah Lee Smith, who also starred in the Gossip Girl TV reboot), the daughter of the Vice President of the United States, to pledge to Caroline’s sorority and save it from further scrutiny. Silva plays CeCe, Caroline’s fast-talking, desperately loyal, scene-stealing best friend and authoritarian second-in-command, who keeps the sorority running smoothly while Caroline plots and schemes.
CeCe is based on Blair’s character in the OG movie — the childish, spoiled, and inexperienced Cecile, who is targeted by the stepsiblings — and it’s not hard to spot the surface-level similarities. In fact, when Silva started the audition process, she tweeted a photo of Blair circa the late ’90s because they looked so similar. (This, Silva says, was the moment she knew the role was meant to be, and when her casting was announced, she retweeted the post as a “called it” moment.) But other than their visual likeness, Silva did not spend much time thinking about Blair’s performance — or the film itself.
“I watched the movie [for the first time] when I got the audition, so I did not have any of the nostalgia for it. Obviously, it was incredible, but I don’t think I had the same shock factor as I would have,” she says. “The essence of [Cecile] is there, but the writers took it and ran with a completely new version. There was not as much pressure for me to, like, do the original justice or something, because it’s not like I grew up with it. So, I guess in a way, it was a little bit of a blessing.”
But while CeCe has the same bubbly, eager-to-please qualities as Cecile, the show also takes her in an entirely different direction. In Silva’s hands, CeCe is clever and witty, neurotic and full of longing, both wise and naive. She responds to every one of Caroline’s horrible whims (despite being mistreated herself), putting their “friendship” above all else. But in the moments when she’s alone, she can be surprisingly kind, perceptive, and even vulnerable.
There’s a scene midway through the season in which she’s caught sobbing on her sorority’s staircase, having just returned from the hospital after fainting. In an anxious spiral about how off she’s been feeling, she monologues about how she thinks she’s dying, only for someone else to point out that she’s just described being in love. Silva elevates CeCe from a pawn on Caroline’s chessboard to the show’s most memorable character. She’s consistently the funniest, but moments of comedic relief also give way to intricate nuances that make CeCe feel like a character worth knowing. And, away from Caroline, she comes into her own, finding her main character energy when sharing scenes with the professor she’s TAing for. (That prof, by the way, is portrayed by Sean Patrick Thomas, who played a different character in the film.)
“CeCe flowed out of me. I was like, ‘Maybe there is something about this character that I have in me,’ which is something I came to learn. I’m pretty neurotic, but I mask it well with a ‘cool girl,’ ‘chill girl’ mask on the exterior. On the inside, I have racing thoughts and am a perfectionist and a people pleaser,” Silva says. “It was fun to see and lean into those similarities that I share with CeCe. [At the time], I [was dealing] with deep insecurities coming up to the surface, which is basically the premise of CeCe’s character — she’s so insecure, is constantly talking and doing things to prove her worth, is going to overachieve. It was almost a healing, therapeutic experience. Now, I feel like I’m finally in a place where I’m ready to not feel so pressured to be that cool girl.”
Hollywood has been trying to make a TV adaptation of Cruel Intentions for nearly a decade now. At one point, Gellar was even attached to star as the mother to a Caroline-like figure. And while Silva says the sexy, wealthy cat-and-mouse aspect of the narrative will always have a certain timeless appeal (the movie is adapted from the 18th-century French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses), the show has cracked a way to make a familiar tale feel relevant and contemporary, and CeCe is key to that. She’s a character who offers viewers an entry into this heightened world of insufferable rich kids because she’s still figuring it all out, too.
“She’s just so relatable because she’s so pure — she wants so badly to feel good about herself, and she kind of gets caught up with the wrong people,” Silva says. “When you’re young and naive and want so badly to be liked that you’re willing to do whatever it takes, you don’t realize that you might have more confidence than you think. That’s a classic young person thing — [realizing] this cool scene isn’t where I belong, but maybe I need to find people who actually understand me. That’s something we still deal with to this day.”
Cruel Intentions premieres on Prime Video on November 21.
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This article was originally published on refinery29.com.