You Won’t Believe What Film This ‘Waltons’ Actress Almost Starred In
During her six-season run on The Waltons, Mary Beth McDonough became synonymous with her character, the friendly, outgoing Erin Walton. But McDonough came quite close to playing a very, very different iconic young female character instead. As she revealed during a panel at the MidSouth Nostalgia Festival in Olive Branch, Mississippi, earlier this month, McDonough was once in the running to play Regan MacNeil, the 12-year-old girl whose horrifying possession is at the heart of 1973’s The Exorcist.
As McDonough recalled, she was a tween enrolled in dance classes in her hometown of Los Angeles when she heard that about an opportunity to give acting a try: “About then, producers of The Homecoming, the pilot for The Waltons, were looking for red-headed kids because creator Earl Hamner’s family was all redheads.”
It was McDonough’s “very first audition,” and the process involved a somewhat grueling six callbacks. But she landed the role, appearing in The Homecoming: A Christmas Story, which aired in December 1971.
Laurie Jacobson
However, between the special’s shooting and airing, McDonough continued exploring her options with acting — leading her to a situation that definitely would never occur on the mountain. “Less than a year [after shooting the special], I was one of six girls up for The Exorcist,” McDonough recalled. “But The Waltons started and the rest is history.”
The popularity of Homecoming led CBS to order the first season of The Waltons. The show spent six seasons as one of the top 20 programs in the country, and even after the series wrapped in 1981, it yielded six more TV movies over the next 16 years.
The girl who landed the role of Regan MacNeil was, of course, Linda Blair; her portrayal of an innocent preteen beset by demonic forces helped make The Exorcist one of the most successful movies of its era, earning $441.3 million at the box office and becoming the first horror movie to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
Still, those Waltons dinners probably went down better than all that pea soup.
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