In the early 2000s, Tara Reid was one of the queens of teen movies, especially thanks to her starring role in the first two American Pie movies. The actor also appeared in Cruel Intentions, The Big Lebowski, Van Wilder, Josie and the Pussycats, and My Boss’s Daughter, all within the span of a few years. During the time, Reid was also a big hit with the paparazzi and the tabloids, which she now says negatively affected her career.
Today, Reid is still acting, but she’s moved from teen movies to, well, shark movies. Six of them. Read on to find out more about Reid’s life and work now at 46 years old.
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Though Reid isn’t quite as famous as she was during the height of her teen movie days, she’s been consistently putting out movies ever since. She found particular success with the Sharknado franchise, beginning with the first movie in 2013. The actor went on to appear in all five sequels, concluding with The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time in 2018.
“‘I’m not doing a movie called Sharknado. That sounds ridiculous,'” Reid said she told her agent in an interview with W magazine. “It was the worst movie I ever read … It became the biggest sensation, ever.”
Reid has also appeared in 2012’s American Reunion—the fourth American Pie movie—and in recent years, she was in the TV movie A Royal Christmas Ball, the horror movie Mummy Dearest, and the action movie Attraction to Paris. In fact, the former teen idol works a lot overall. In 2021, she was in four movies, and in 2020, she was in five.
Reid founded the production company Hi Happy Films.
“I finally decided, I’m not going to wait for people to cast me, I’m going to start casting myself,” she told Variety of starting to produce in a March 2022 interview. “I’m going to make my own destiny, my own future.”
She continued, “When it’s in your control, you can make things happen because no one’s going to work harder than you for yourself. And so I feel like I created my own narrative. I’m in a great space right now and it’s a very exciting time in my career.”
One of the upcoming films Reid is producing is Masha’s Mushroom in which she stars alongside Vivica A. Fox. She also had producer credits on the last two Sharknado movies.
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In the ’00s, Reid was photographed by paparazzi almost everywhere she went and often captured partying, earning her a reputation similar to that of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan at the time. Publications spread gossip about her and made fun of her.
“People don’t realize by them bullying you, especially with magazines, that you lose jobs, you lose work, you lose money,” she told W in 2021. She added that today’s stars are able to share their side of the story more openly than she was. “That’s the one good thing about social media, is that you get to speak your voice when you couldn’t before,” she said.
She also told Variety that people still think of her as being in her 20s.
“Being judged as being 21 when I’m 46, that’s been the hardest part,” she said. “To say, ‘Hey, here I am. I’m a woman, I run businesses.’ I think that you’re gonna see really a lot this year, and it’s exciting to feel it, to have everyone kind of rooting for you this time. And I really hope that will come through in every way.”
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Reid reunited with her American Pie co-stars for the 20th anniversary of the movie in 2019 with Entertainment Tonight. It was the first time all of them had been together since 2012’s American Reunion.
In 2021, Reid told ET that she stays connected with the cast. “We all stay in touch in different ways. Natasha [Lyonne]‘s one of my closest friends.” Reid added, “When you grow up with someone and you get your first breaks with someone, you can never forget that.”
Reid also said that there was an idea for another American Pie movie but that she had no idea when it would be made.
“I can’t tell you when, because I don’t really know when, because we have to get all the actors together at the same time to get our schedules together, but there is a script out there, I’ll put it that way,” she said. “It’s one of the best ones. It’s amazing … This will happen, I just don’t know when.”