Buddy the Elf almost fell in love with a different retail Mrs. Claus. On the latest episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast, Zooey Deschanel revealed that she almost wasn’t in Elf, as another A-list star was initially cast as her character.
Speaking to host Alex Cooper, the actor recalled her audition for Elf, where she had prepared to read for the role of Jovie, who worked the holiday shift at New York department store Gimbel’s and inadvertently became the love interest of Will Ferrell’s Buddy the Elf. However, after arriving for the audition, she was informed that the part had just been taken.
“When I met with Jon Favreau, the director, I walked in, and he was like, ‘Oh, you don’t need to read. We just offered it to Katie Holmes,’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Oh, OK, cool.’” However, Favreau didn’t want to waste her time, asking Deschanel to “sit down and talk for a minute.”
“What was great about that was I wasn’t nervous,” Deschanel explained. “When you’re an actor, you’re first starting, and you’re auditioning, you get nervous, and you’re psyching yourself up. I wasn’t nervous at all, because I was like, ‘Well, I’m not getting the part.’”
How Did Zooey Land The Part?
A few months later, Holmes ultimately dropped out of Elf due to a scheduling conflict. (It likely had to do with the final season of her series, Dawson’s Creek, which aired six months before the film premiered in theaters.) It turns out that Deschanel’s casual talk with Favreau paid off, as she was offered the role next, and even inspired some of her character’s qualities.
“They were like, ‘Who should we have?’” she told Cooper. “I think the character was kind of meant to be worked around whoever played her, and they knew I sang because I had a cabaret act, so that kind of worked out with the character.”
Deschanel’s casting ended up making for one of the film’s more iconic moments, Buddy and Jovie’s “Baby It’s Cold Outside” duet, which she recreated with Ferrell during a virtual Elf reunion in 2020, down to Jovie’s shocked reaction when she discovered Buddy in the bathroom. “Loved reuniting with the cast and all our very special guests,” she wrote at the time.
