Devon Sawa says Macaulay Culkin almost starred in Eminem's 'Stan' video

The music video nearly saw the "Home Alone" star as the disturbed Eminem fan.

One of Devon Sawa’s most enduring projects is Eminem’s music video for “Stan” — and the Final Destination star has revealed that he almost didn’t get the part.

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Sawa said that the 2000 music video, which was directed by Dr. Dre and Philip Atwell, nearly starred a different former child actor. "Full disclosure: they went out to Macaulay Culkin first, I believe,” he said. “I think that they wanted him, and he wasn't available, or didn't want to do it or whatever."

Reps for Eminem and Culkin did not immediately respond to EW's request for comment.

The video sees Sawa play the titular character, a disturbed young Eminem fan who writes the rapper increasingly angry letters as he seeks to form a friendship with the musician. Sawa lip-syncs many of Eminem’s lyrics in character as Stan — and he didn’t know that reciting the song’s words would be part of the job. "I'll never forget, they told me on the day that I was going to lip-sync it," Sawa said. "I remember, the first take I did, Dre running in and being like, 'It was good, but can you try it with some rhythm this time?' And I was like, 'Oh my God.' And that was kind of how the day went."

The iconic video has over 700 million views on YouTube to date. Sawa said that he was originally cast in the project because Dr. Dre was a fan of his work in Final Destination. “Dre loved FD,” the actor wrote on social media in 2017.

English singer Dido plays Stan’s pregnant girlfriend in the video — a fitting piece of casting, as “Stan” prominently samples her song 1998 “Thank You.” The video depicts a distressing turn of events for the couple: Stan locks his girlfriend in the trunk of his car and drives it off a bridge as he records one final message for Eminem.

Since the release of the song, “stan” has worked its way into common parlance, referring to intense fandom, particularly directed toward musicians. The word made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017.

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