Josie and the Pussycats is one of those movies that bombed at the box office, but managed to earn a reputation as a cult classic in the years that followed. Now widely understood as criminally underrated, Josie featured a murderer’s row of talent, many of whom at the height of their comedic powers. Rachael Leigh Cook may have ended up in “movie jail” after it tanked, but her supporting cast included Rosario Dawson, Tara Reid, Parker Posey, Alan Cumming, Paulo Costanzo, Donald Faison, Seth Green, Breckin Meyer, and Missi Pyle. More than twenty years later, Pyle and Cook reunite for Netflix’s new A Tourist’s Guide to Love, and it’s clear that the pair still love working together.
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Speaking with Tudum (via Deadline), the two reminisced about working together on Josie and the Pussycats — including a scene in which Pyle’s Alexandra Cabot famously accused Josie of sleeping with Mr. Moviefone (the voice of a telephone movie guide, who had a cameo as part of an evil, global conspiracy in the movie). They also talked more broadly about how much they admire where one another have gone since.
“I remember Missi improvising things that made all of us absolutely cry laughing,” Cook said. “An especially brilliant moment from her is when my character is having a big revelation about the conspiracy that is afoot, and Missi completely steals the scene by paying attention to nothing I’m saying and silently sneaking up behind me, plucking a hair from my head and inspecting it. I remember watching playback on the monitor absolutely in awe.”
“I’ve seen her here and there throughout the years, and I’ve always loved her,” Pyle said. “She’s hilarious. She has a very dry sense of humor and she’s obviously beautiful and soulful, and I love what’s she’s done: She’s created this whole world for herself. I’m just floored and blown away by her. She’s doing something that a lot of other actors, myself included, have yet to do. She’s blazing her own way.”
Ironically, Pyle said that her take on Alexandra was that she just wanted to be one of the Pussycats. You can certainly read that between the lines of the movie, but that interpretation of the character was used much more overtly in a comic book run by Marguerite Bennett and Cameron DeOrdio many years after the movie’s release.
The movie was released in early 2001 to baffled reviews and an indifferent audience, but has gone on in the intervening years to become a cult classic. Writer-directors Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, who have turned to TV since Josie came out, actually pitched a follow-up to the movie a few years ago — albeit one without Josie or the Pussycats. The prospective follow-up would have centered on DuJour, a boy band that featured Donald Faison, Alexander Martin, Seth Green, and Breckin Meyer, in a twenty-year-later reunion tour. They reportedly pitched it to Netflix with Green and Meyer attached, but it stalled.
“I think they should re-pitch it,” music legend Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds said in a 2021 book about the film. “I think that there’ll be another time for that. I especially think that with an older group coming back now, there’s something that could be funny in it, and fun as well. Maybe it’s their kids that are getting into it or something. But it should be looked at. I’d be down for it. I can think of running into Seth Green and Breckin Meyer, and they were like, ‘We really need to do it again. We need to do that group.’ They really wanted to follow up on this group.”
