Britney Spears was up for the role of a lifetime, and the footage has finally been found.
Spears’ screen test for the role of Allie Hamilton, opposite Ryan Gosling, in The Notebook has been released. Casting director Matthew Barry shared the footage with The Daily Mail.
In the 2 1/2-minute clip, a then 21-year-old Spears wears a simple white lace top as she stands in front of Gosling — who is off-screen — and a camera.
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Spears becomes emotional on queue as she recites Allie’s monologue where she is faced with the decision to choose between Noah (Gosling) and her wealthy fiancé.
In a heart-wrenching moment, Spears begins to cry as she delivers the lines, “I prayed for you to die in the war, really. Well, not die. I would have felt completely horrible if you would die. But I kinda didn’t want you to be alive anymore because I couldn’t bear the thought of you being with somebody else, or of us never seeing each other again. So I gotta go, OK?”
The clip ends before you could see the reaction from Gosling or the other people in the room.
According to Barry, Spears blew everyone in the room away with her performance.
New Line Cinema
“Britney wasn’t just good — she was phenomenal,” he told The Daily Mail. “It was a tough decision. Britney blew us all away. Our jaws were on the floor. I was blown away. Absolutely blown away. She brought her A-game that day.”
Barry said that Spears beat out Scarlett Johansson Jessica Biel, Mandy Moore, Kate Bosworth, Claire Danes and Amy Adams. The role ultimately went to a then-unknown, Rachel McAdams.
Prior to her audition for The Notebook, the “Toxic” songstress played the lead role in the movie Crossroads in 2002.
In her memoir, The Woman in Me, Spears got candid about her lack of desire to act and why she was fine not landing the role.
“If I had, instead of working on my album In the Zone, I’d have been acting like a 1940s heiress day and night,” she said according to The Daily Mail. “I hope I never get close to that occupational hazard again. Living that way, being half yourself and half a fictional character, is messed up. After a while you don’t know what’s real anymore.”
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