One time, Alyson Hannigan almost missed the bus back to band camp.
Ahead of the 1999 teen movie’s 25th anniversary, the American Pie actress reminisced about her role as lovable band nerd Michelle Flaherty in the raunchy franchise and how she almost wasn’t in the sequels.
“The best story from the whole thing was that, you know, it was a low-budget movie with all these tiers of negotiations,” Hannigan told Vulture. “There was an A-tier and a B-tier. I think I was on the bottom C-tier with Seann [William Scott].”
She explained that the tiers were “in regards to pay,” adding: “So it’s just scale plus 10 [percent to an agent]. There’s no negotiating on the C-tier because the character is not that important.
“I was like, ‘Okay, fine.’ It was seven days and it was more of a passion project. Then, in the contract, there was a sequel clause,” Hannigan continued. “I said, ‘Look, I’m getting paid scale plus 10. I’m not going to sign for a sequel. That doesn’t make sense.’ I sound like I was being really difficult, but I just thought it was silly. So they took that [clause] out, which ended up being really nice for me when I did the sequel. There were a couple smart things I did back then.”
Seann William Scott, January Jones, Jason Biggs, Alyson Hannigan, Eddie Kaye Thomas and Thomas Ian Nicholas star in American Wedding (2003). Credit: Universal / Courtesy Everett Collection
Amid last year’s SAG-AFTRA strike, Scott — who starred as toxic hornball Steve Stifler — revealed he only made $8,000 for his work on the first movie, which grossed $235 million at the box office.
American Pie starred Jason Biggs, Chris Klein, Thomas Ian Nicholas and Eddie Kaye Thomas as a group of high school friends who make a pact to lose their virginities before graduation. When he strikes out with the sexy foreign exchange student Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth), Jim (Biggs) asks Michelle to be his last-minute prom date.
Hannigan reprised her role as the quirky flutist with a naughty side, leading alongside Biggs in American Pie 2 (2001), American Wedding (2003), and 2012’s American Reunion.
Amid her breakout role as Willow Rosenberg on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Hannigan said she was enticed by playing Michelle because the character “surprises you at the end,” adding: “I was already playing, like, the perfect person on Buffy, and Michelle was the opposite.”
Hannigan juggled both roles as the movie’s producers “had to clear my schedule for Buffy,” but she was “just glad it worked out.”
“The second one I worked 11 days because I was still on Buffy,” she recalled. “For the third one, I worked weekends and that was brutal because there was a day when I worked all night on American Pie and drove straight to the Buffy set. It was like a 36-hour day or something. Crazy.”