If you’re wondering what Brittany Murphy was really like, you might want to ask her “Clueless” co-stars. Breckin Meyer, who played Murphy’s onscreen crush in the rom-com, also acted alongside Murphy previously. “Brittany and I played boyfriend and girlfriend in a couple things,” he told People in 2023. Meyer was privately hoping Murphy nabbed the part because of their friendship, but objectively she was a shoo-in. Meyer explained that he’d thought, “‘I don’t know if I’m going to get the part, but if you don’t make the movie with [Murphy], don’t make the movie.’ She’s that great. She was.” He added that even today, he thinks “about what she’d be doing now because of how talented she was. … Brittany could sing like nobody’s business, and I look at things like [how] they’re doing the movie ‘Wicked’ now. I … think Brittany would be killing this stuff right now.”
Meyer’s take on the late actor’s talent is pretty much a universal one. In 2020, Alicia Silverstone told Vogue that she knew right away Murphy was a star. Along with the “Clueless” stars, the film’s director was in awe of Murphy’s talent. “We saw a lot of people for the part of Tai, and I felt like everybody was kind of acting it as opposed to just feeling it. And when Brittany came in, she was just genuine,” Amy Heckerling recalled in the HBO documentary, “What Happened, Brittany Murphy?” (via E! News). “She just felt… exactly what I was looking for.”
