She went from teen comedy sweetheart to tabloid cautionary tale to the only actress who could survive being eaten by a shark in outer space.
At a glance
- Known for
- *American Pie* franchise, *Sharknado* series, *The Big Lebowski*
- Before fame
- Started acting at six, doing Jell-O and McDonald's commercials
- Off-screen
- Never been legally married despite two broken engagements and one announced wedding
Rise to Fame
A Jell-O commercial kid from Wyckoff, New Jersey doesn't usually end up in a Coen brothers movie, but Tara Reid landed the role of Bunny Lebowski in 1998 and parlayed it into something bigger. American Pie came the next year, grossed over $100 million domestically, and turned her into one of the defining faces of late-'90s teen comedy.
The sequel pulled $145 million, and Van Wilder opposite Ryan Reynolds kept her in the mix. For about three years, she was in every comedy that mattered. The problem was that the party-circuit coverage, the tabloid photos alongside Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, started outpacing the actual filmography. Hollywood cast her as the It-Girl, and then punished her for playing the part.
In the Spotlight
Most careers that crater the way hers did in the mid-2000s don't come back. Hers came back inside a tornado full of sharks. The first Sharknado drew 1.4 million viewers on Syfy in 2013; the sequel pulled 3.9 million on a Wednesday night. She starred in all six films, and Twitter fans voted to keep her character alive between installments.
The franchise turned her into a camp fixture, which isn't the same as a comeback but functions like one. She's producing her own projects: Dr. Quarantine, a psychological thriller that won indie festival awards and secured distribution on Amazon Prime. The work is smaller than it used to be, but she's the one with the producing credits, and an industry that declared her finished doesn't get to weigh in.
Side Notes
In 2004, a surgeon gave her C-cup implants when she'd asked for B-cups, and a liposuction left her stomach visibly damaged. A wardrobe malfunction at Diddy's birthday party that November put the results on every tabloid cover. She had corrective surgery in 2006 and landed on the cover of Us Weekly under the headline "My Plastic Surgery Nightmare."
"I never did sex tapes, I never did anything wrong," she's said. "I never even got a speeding ticket." Her classmates at the Professional Children's School in New York included Sarah Michelle Gellar, Macaulay Culkin, and Jerry O'Connell. Most of them outgrew their child-star labels. She got stuck with hers.