How Alicia Silverstone Ended Up In So Many Aerosmith Music Videos
Alicia Silverstone's breakout role actually wasn't in "Clueless." A few years before the teen actor became a household name for her role as Cher Horowitz in the hit 1995 Amy Heckerling comedy, she was the "face" of the rock band Aerosmith. In the early 1990s, Silverstone, then just around 17 years old, appeared in three Aerosmith music videos. The first of the bunch was "Cryin'," which debuted on MTV in 1993. Next up was the video for the power ballad, "Amazing" later that year, and last was "Crazy" in 1994, per IMDb. Silverstone was credited as "teen girl" and "school girl" for the videos, which featured her rebellious character sneaking out of a school window, getting a belly button piercing, and pushing an aggressive dude off his motorcycle.
For the final installment of the video trilogy, Silverstone was joined by Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler's then-teen daughter, Liv Tyler, for a wild road trip. "I remember I was in high school when I made [the video]" Liv told MTV in 2014. "I would wake up in the morning for school, put on the MTV countdown. And when the video would come on I'd get so embarrassed, that's when I would get in the shower."
For Silverstone, though, there was no embarrassment. The videos marked a major boost for her career, and it's all because the director liked what he saw in her very first film.
Alicia Silverstone was picked for the Aerosmith videos after the director saw her in the movie The Crush
Alicia Silverstone got her big break as a video star after director Marty Callner saw her in the 1993 movie "The Crush." The teen thriller was only the second acting credit for Silverstone. Her first was in an episode of "The Wonder Years" that same year, per IMDb. In an interview with Rolling Stone, the California native said Callner saw past her beauty when he cast her for her first Aerosmith video, "Cryin'." She said, "He liked what he saw in the movie." Silverstone added, "And what he saw was a good actress, not a pretty girl."
The "Batman & Robin" star noted that the "Cryin'" video didn't feature the usual "sexy" video vixen clichés and was instead about a "real" teen's struggles. As for why she was asked to make a second music video for the band, Silverstone said, "Aerosmith made a hell of a lot of money off that video. Their sales tripled or something. They would have been crazy not to ask me back." It's no wonder Aerosmith got a clue. "Cryin'" alone won Video Of The Year, Best Group Video, and the coveted Viewers Choice at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards, per the AV Club.
Alicia Silverstone didn't like being called the 'Aerosmith Chick'
Despite her young age, Alicia Silverstone set some ground rules for working on the Aerosmith music videos. In a 1994 interview on "The John Stewart Show," she was asked if it was "weird" to do everything in the videos, like kissing a guy on a motorcycle, and she said, "Yeah ... you just do it." However, in an interview with The Guardian, she revealed that she told director Marty Callner that she was "not going to strip" or do anything sexy in the video for "Crazy."
Silverstone's music video trifecta meant she was often recognized as the "Aerosmith girl." But she once revealed she didn't like the label. "I do remember when I was in the Aerosmith videos and people would call me 'The Aerosmith chick,' and I was like 17 and I was very offended!" she told Cinema Blend. "Because I was like, 'I'm a very serious actress. How could you? The Aerosmith chick?" Now, though, she finds it more amusing than offensive.
Still, her Aerosmith status was what caught the eye of movie maker Amy Heckerling, who ultimately cast her as the lead in the 1995 movie "Clueless." The starring film role was a life-changing move that catapulted the young actor into pop culture superstardom. "I was minding my own business on my treadmill watching MTV when I saw 'Cryin" and just went cuckoo bananas," Heckerling told Rolling Stone of how she discovered the teen star nearly 30 years ago.