‘Josie and the Pussycats’ Cast: Where Are They Now? Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and More

usmagazine.com:

Totally jerkin! Josie and the Pussycats was a box-office flop when it was released in April 2001, but the film and its soundtrack have since earned cult status among fans.Written and directed by Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, the movie is a loose adaption of the Archie Comics series Josie and the Pussycats — and it hit theaters over a decade before Riverdale reinvigorated interest in Archie, Betty, Veronica and the whole gang.When the film celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2021, Elfont revealed that curiosity about the movie was at a higher level than it ever was when Josie actually premiered. “It’s crazy how it has grown in people’s interest and the movie has grown over the years, as opposed to a movie that made a lot of noise when it came out and then nobody really talked about it anymore,” he told InStyle in April 2021. “This is kind of a unique and fun experience to go through, to have people still want to ask us about this movie 20 years later.”The movie followed Josie (Rachael Leigh Cook) and her bandmates Melody (Tara Reid) and Valerie (Rosario Dawson) during their abrupt rise to fame.

The trio eventually discover that their label, MegaRecords, is using their music to hide subliminal messages about what products and slang are cool.The actresses didn’t actually sing in the movie, but the soundtrack still became a hit thanks in part to the participation of Letters to Cleo frontwoman Kay Hanley, who provided the vocals for Josie. (10 Things I Hate About You fans will remember Letters to Cleo as the band that’s performing on the roof of the high school during the film’s closing credits.)“We got to meet Kay before we went to shoot,” Cook recalled in a September 2017 interview with The Fader, which called Josie and