What happens in casting doesn’t stay in casting: Vegas Vacation star Marisol Nichols reveals she replaced Brittany Murphy as the fourth actress to play Audrey Griswold. In her first film role, Nichols portrayed the thrice-recast role of Audrey after Dana Barron (National Lampoon’s Vacation, TV movie Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure), Dana Hill (National Lampoon’s European Vacation), and Juliette Lewis (National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation). The 1997 sequel sees the Griswold clan — gambling family man Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase), matriarch Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo), and teenaged children Audrey and Rusty (Ethan Embry) — roll the dice on a fabulous family vacation to Las Vegas, Nevada.
“I was shocked when I got cast in Vegas Vacation because I was fresh off the boat from Chicago. They had me audition for three months. They cast somebody else, that person said no — it was actually Brittany Murphy,” Nichols said of the Clueless star during a National Lampoon’s Vacation cast reunion panel at Pittsburgh’s Steel City Con. “They ended up giving me the role, and this was the first movie set I’d ever been on in my life.”
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Nichols, who had appeared on episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210 and ER, had “never even been an extra [in a movie],” she said. “It was a very, very eye-opening experience, and I learned a lot playing the fourth Audrey.”
Nichols said later during the panel she thought producers “were never, ever, ever going to hire … this little Latin kid from Chicago.”
“‘Audrey Griswold was like [part of] the all-American family, they’re never going to hire me,’” Nichols recalled thinking. “Three months of jumping through hoops and [auditioning] again and again, I got it.”
In a 2014 interview with Retro LadyLand, original Audrey actress Barron explained the roles of Audrey and Rusty Griswold were recast after 1983’s Vacation because of Hall’s success in John Hughes films Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club.
“He was about to film Weird Science and because he was contracted to do that and was filming over the summer, when they wanted to do [European Vacation] … he said no,” Barron said. “Which made me so sad because I basically had my bags packed, waiting by the door and then the director at the time [Amy Heckerling] said, ‘Well, just get two new kids, we can’t have an old kid and a new kid, it’ll look strange’… So I was waiting and waiting and waiting by the phone, and they went on and filmed without me.”
Nichols appeared at the panel alongside original Vacation co-stars D’Angelo, Barron, and Anthony Michael Hall, European Vacation’s Rusty actor Jason Lively, and Miriam Flynn, who appeared in multiple Vacations as Cousin Catherine, wife of Randy Quaid’s Cousin Eddie. Leslie Mann played an adult Audrey in 2015’s Vacation, starring Ed Helms as grown-up Rusty Griswold.
