Jamie Lynn Spears is opening up—not about her fractured relationship with sister Britney Spears or her time as a child actor at Nickelodeon, but an unsuccessful audition for Twilight, which began filming the year her popular teen series Zoey 101 went off the air.
In an interview with Variety completed before the actors strike, Spears recalled drama surrounding the end of Zoey 101 after four seasons—a decision reportedly made prior to her pregnancy, but announced alongside news that she was expecting a baby at age 16. “I think, when I wrapped Zoey, there were all these plans of things like, ‘Let’s go do movies.’ I was reading scripts for things I was excited about,” she told the outlet.
One such script? “I did read for Twilight,” Spears said. “This was before vampires had really made their mark. Now we all love to watch stories about vampires, but I literally was like, ‘Vampires? Are you kidding me?’ I remember reading it and going, ‘Who is going to watch these vampires?’ Boy, was I wrong.”
Spears previously recalled this experience to Nylon, revealing that she was unknowingly pregnant during the audition. “I remember sitting in this little room, and I think Lily Collins was there, and I felt so sick. Little did I know, I was pregnant,” she told the publication in 2020.
Instead of appearing in Twilight, Spears retreated from the spotlight to Mississippi, where she welcomed her daughter Maddie, now age 15. “I was so concerned about bringing another human being into this world, but I needed to figure out who I was. And the press wasn’t exactly very nice,” Spears said. “I wanted to get as far away from it as I could.”
Spears maintains that, though raising her daughter “was not something that I regret or held me back,” she did harbor fears that her acting career wouldn’t bounce back. “I was like, ‘What if it doesn’t work out?’ But it was something I always wanted,” Spears said. “I think I was afraid to admit it to myself because I didn’t wanna give everybody the satisfaction of saying, ‘It’s not gonna happen for you. You had a baby, remember?’”
Since returning to the screen in 2020, Spears has appeared on Netflix’s Sweet Magnolias, which returns for a third season on July 20, and stars in Zoey 102, a revival of her hit show that debuts via Paramount+ on July 27.