What The Cast Of Spring Breakers Looks Like Today
According to Deadline, Spring Breakers is currently being developed as a digital series just five years after its initial release, meaning many of us will likely revisit Harmony Korine's hedonistic crime drama for a second look before it gets rebooted for the small screen. The film follows four broke college students (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine) as they head to Florida on spring break with some money they got from an impromptu robbery. Once they get there, they realize they've acquired a taste for the life of crime and don't want to give it up just yet. Together with rapper/gangster/meth dealer Alien (a platinum-grilled, corn-rowed James Franco), the girls embark on a substance fueled crime spree in the Atlanta area, shooting first and asking questions later.
Spring Breakers is a movie that split critical opinion like not many movies can, with some outlets such as The Guardian accusing it of reinforcing rape culture while others debated over whether it actually qualified as feminism. Whether it amounts to a work of genius or utter trash depends on your perspective, but one thing we can all agree on is the cast of fresh-faced co-eds that brought Spring Breakers to life so vividly are starting to look all grown up.
Selena Gomez
What is it with Disney kids and going from one extreme to another as soon as they hit adulthood? Selena Gomez couldn't wait to shed her child actor image and leave Alex Russo – the character she portrayed in Disney show Wizards of Waverly Place between 2007 and 2012 – in the past. She first auditioned for the show aged just 11 but was considered a little young at the time, so producers waited until she was 14 to cast her. By the time she left the show five years and 106 episodes later, she was a household name with plenty of offers on the table.
One such offer was the part of a confused Christian girl named Faith in Spring Breakers, a role that would present Gomez with the opportunity to evolve her image. While her character is the least wild of the four girls and is the first to abandon their new life of crime when things get real, she still hits the bong and pees in the street with the others, a far cry from Gomez's Disney past.
In the years since she has resisted to the urge to go full-Miley and has kept it relatively classy, landing a voice role in the Hotel Transylvania film series and continuing to pursue a career in music. She is also an executive producer on wildly popular Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, choosing to stay behind the camera for the project rather than star in it.
Vanessa Hudgens
Another actress who came into Spring Breakers looking to expand her audience beyond Disney fans was Vanessa Hudgens, who caught the eye of producers with her supporting role in critically acclaimed drama Thirteen before landing a role in High School Musical that would see her rise to prominence. The Mouse House were quick to notice the chemistry between Hudgens and male lead Zac Efron, which proved so strong that the pair wound up dating.
After four years together, the attention Efron got from other girls became too much for Hudgens to handle, as she explained to New York Times. "I went through a phase when I was really mean because I was so fed up," she said. "Girls were running after him, and I was giving them death stares. Then I realized that's not what that's about." They split in 2010 and Hudgens struck out on her own, with doors immediately opening up for her.
She was offered the part of Blondie in female-led fantasy epic Sucker Punch and looked pretty comfortable clad in leather machine-gunning down scores of soldiers. She followed that up with a starring role alongside Dwayne Johnson and Josh Hutcherson in the action-packed Journey 2: The Mysterious Island before landing the part of Candy in Spring Breakers, a role that made that previous two seem pale in comparison. Recently Hudgens has been plying her trade in DC superhero sit-com Powerless, though the show is on the verge of cancellation according to Variety.
Ashley Benson
After starting out with a few minor TV appearances, Benson booked her first big job in 2004 when she landed a part in long-running soap Days of Our Lives, but the young actress was forced to walk away from the show to take a part in the fourth Bring It On film. "I had talked with the [Days of Our Lives] producers about doing this film, and they weren't going to let me do it," she said. "I had passed up a lot of other good opportunities before this."
In It To Win It went direct-to-video and Benson wound up back in TV in the years that followed, most notably in ABC's witchcraft drama Eastwick (the network cancelled the show after a single season but it has since gained a cult following) and the hugely popular Pretty Little Liars. It was during her time on the latter show that she was offered the last-minute part of wild child Brit in Spring Breakers.
"It was the most fun thing I've ever done," she said. "I've known Vanessa [Hudgens] for a really long time, and Selena [Gomez] and I got super close before we started to film. Now, all four of us, we're like sisters." Benson recently revealed that she's taking some time off now Pretty Little Liars has wrapped for the last time, hoping for a break from the spotlight after facing constant criticism over her body image. "People were actually angry that I had gained weight," she said.
Rachel Korine
Rachel Korine, wife of Spring Breakers director Harmony Korine, only ever got into acting because her husband didn't want to be away from her for long periods of time, as she explained to Women's Wear Daily. "I never studied acting, it wasn't even on my radar growing up," she said. "Harmony started writing roles for me so I could come with him while he was away filming, so we wouldn't be apart. That was the idea at first: it obviously evolved."
The trouble was, by the time they started working together Harmony had fallen out of favor with critics, unable to draw the kind of praise his earlier, edgier work got. The Korines first collaborated in the "frustratingly dull" Mister Lonely (2007) and they worked together again for the "deeply discomfiting" Trash Humpers (2009) before Harmony wrote the part of Cotty into Spring Breakers.
Rachel's character is the second to drop out of their bikini clad criminal gang, heading for home after she gets clipped in a drive-by shooting. Cotty has been the most memorable of all the characters Harmony has written for his wife, and her performance led to her getting cast by other directors. In 2014 she worked under Marni Zelnick in indie drama Druid's Peak and appeared in another low-key production the following year, Zachary Treitz historical drama Men Go To Battle. Despite both films generating festival buzz, she never got that breakout role and hasn't been cast in anything since 2015.
James Franco
Following his turn as Harry Osborn in the Spider-Man movies and a starring role in the Oscar nominated 127 Hours, Franco was undoubtedly the biggest name on the Spring Breakers cast going in to the film; and although Selena Gomez has certainly made up some ground, he's still the biggest star of the lot today. The usually lovable, sometimes weird star of Pineapple Express and numerous other Seth Rogen-related projects hasn't come up for breath since starring as trigger happy rapper Alien in Spring Breakers, working non-stop since.
Franco has split his time between smaller indie projects and big-budget movies like 2013's Oz The Great and Powerful and, more recently, Alien: Covenant, in which he originally had a far bigger part than a fleeting cameo according to The Hollywood Reporter. Having his screen time in Ridley Scott's latest Alien installment cut down isn't likely to bother him that much, however, as he currently has a whopping 15 projects in some stage of production. Most interesting of the lot is Franco's duel role as twin brothers Vincent and Frankie Martino in HBO's The Deuce, a series set in and around New York's pornography industry in the 1970s.
Right now Franco is also celebrating the fact that Spring Breakers distributor A24 have picked up his latest outing as a director, the critically acclaimed comedy The Disaster Artist. He and his brother Dave Franco lead a cast including Seth Rogen, Alison Brie and Josh Hutcherson.
Gucci Mane
While Big Arch is no stranger to breaking the law, the character pales in comparison to the actor behind him. Atlanta rapper Gucci Mane had been in trouble with authorities on several occasions before Korine cast him in Spring Breakers, with his legal troubles beginning during a 2005 murder investigation. After fellow rapper Young Jeezy put a $10,000 bounty on Mane's chain, four men broke into his home to rob him and, according to Mane, during the scuffle he grabbed a gun and shot one of the intruders dead. His body was found buried behind a school three days later.
While the murder charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence, Mane ended up in jail in 2008 anyway after only completing 25 of the 600 hours of community service ordered after a separate assault. He was arrested again after driving erratically in 2010. A plea of mental incompetence was filed and the judge sent him to a "111-bed psychiatric and chemical dependency treatment facility." A few days after release, Gucci got his bizarre ice cream cone face tattoo.
He didn't mellow out much after Spring Breakers (in March 2013 Atlanta police issued a warrant for Mane's arrest after he hit a fan with a bottle when they asked for a photo) but a 39-month stint on gun and drug charges seems to have done him some good. He got out last year and is apparently a "slimmer, sober, reformed version of his old self."
Heather Morris
Despite having toured with Beyonce for two years as a kid, Morris got sick of being a dancer and went for a part in Glee. "The whole thing started in December of '08, when I'd made the decision I was going to stop dancing—I wasn't happy, and I'd always had a dream of acting, but I was so nervous, 'cause everybody wants to be an actress," she said.
Glee creator Ryan Murphy decided to expand the minor role of Britney after he found Morris' reaction to a Jane Lynch rant hilarious. "I heard this hysterical laughing," Morris said of the scene. "He walks in, like, 'Heather Morris, you looked so confused, and it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen.' It was literally from that moment on, it just kept getting worse and worse, the dumb things I was saying."
Her goofy one-liners became a part of Glee and she stayed with the show until the final curtain in 2015, some three years after her cameo appearance in Spring Breakers. Morris played Bess, a member of the religious study group attended by Faith (Gomez). Bess warns Faith about the girls she is planning on celebrating spring break with, once at the start of the movie and again in a brief flashback. It's a minor part, but that has largely been the story of her career outside of Glee to date, with her only leading role of any note coming in 2017 TV movie Psycho Wedding Crasher.
Jeff Jarrett
Pro-wrestling legend Jeff Jarrett has tentatively tried to follow the footsteps of Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Dave Bautista and (to a lesser extent) John Cena over the years, but unfortunately the most high profile role he's ever been offered is the enthusiastic Youth Pastor in Spring Breakers. Jarrett made his screen debut in Michael J. Fox comedy Life With Mikey (1993), playing a wrestler named Evil Eye in a short cameo, and he was drafted in to play another wrestler in Chris Rock's directorial debut Head of State (2003), though again it was a throwaway part.
Between 2005 and 2009 Jarrett worked with Larry the Cable Guy on a handful of occasions, appearing as himself in two episodes of Blue Collar TV as well as the Hula-Palooza Christmas Luau. By 2012 it looked as though he had given up on his dream of transitioning into acting, though Val Kilmer's loss (albeit a small loss for an actor of Kilmer's size) was Jarrett's gain. According to the Spring Breakers DVD extras, the Pastor was supposed to be played by Kilmer but he fell ill just before shooting, meaning Jarrett got a last minute call and another credit for his sparse filmography.
The role did nothing for Jarrett's movie career overall, though he remains active behind the scenes in the world of professional wrestling and recently made a deal with Mumbai-based sports channel Sony SIX to bring his promotion Impact Wrestling (formerly known as TNA!) to India.