All of the Stars Who Were Almost Cast in The Notebook

After finding their Noah in Ryan Gosling, the “pressure was on” to cast the movie’s female lead, said Barry, leading to a cross-country search. 

“What happened was he had gotten Ryan and [the studio] didn’t need necessarily a ‘name,’ but they gave us a week to find somebody,” Barry recalled. “They were on the verge of probably not doing the movie and they were just like, ‘Find us somebody special!'”

One of the lead contenders for Allie was the biggest pop star in the world, who also had experience working with Gosling when they were on The Mickey Mouse Club as children. 

“At the height of her career she was like, ‘I want to be really prepared for this,'” Barry recalled of working with Spears, who had just made her movie debut in Crossroads. “So I said, ‘OK, come work with me and my partner.’ And she came in eight hours, two days in a row and worked with us. She was fantastic.”

Spears was so good in fact that she was brought in for the last day of auditions to read with Gosling along with six other actresses, including Jaime King, Jennifer Love Hewitt and, of course, Rachel McAdams. 

“They loved Britney,” Barry said. “It was probably between Rachel and Britney at the time.”

While Barry did admit Cassavetes was initially concerned over Spears’ level of fame—”Am I really going to make a Britney Spears film?”—he added, “It was definitely a consideration because she was really good.”