Sarah Jessica Parker Says She Was Fired From 'Antz' and 'Home on the Range'
Sarah Jessica Parker may seem to lead a charmed life, but she apparently has one Achilles’ heel: talking animals. During a visit to the Howard Stern Show on SiriusXM, the actress acknowledged that she was fired from not one, but two, animated features — Antz, in which she was cast as a princess ant, and Home on the Range, in which she was supposed to play a cow. Watch a quick clip above, and listen to the interview segment below.
“The first time they were like, ‘We’re going in a different direction,’ which I’d always heard like as a joke,” Parker told Stern of the 1998 film Antz. “And then they brought in Sharon Stone. So I was like, oh, you really did go a different [direction]!”
Parker explained that she was using her own voice, which is quite different from Stone’s “old movie star vixen” sound. But then she was fired from 2004’s Home on the Range (which apparently was not a memorable experience, since she misidentified the title in the interview as At Close Range — which is the title of a 1986 Sean Penn crime film).
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“The week before they fired me, they called me to tell me how great I was! Which I felt like was a set-up. But I think they meant it at that time,” Parker said of the confusing experience, adding later, “I’ve had no success playing an animal.”
After those experiences, it’s no wonder that she hasn’t done more animated films — even though it’s considered relatively easy money for successful actors like Parker. As Chris Rock famously described the experience of voicing animated characters: “You go in a booth, you go ‘Okay, what do I say?’ They go, ‘Time to go to the store.’ And then I go, ‘Time to go to the store!’… And then they give me a million dollars.“
