How A Bunch of Airline Miles Landed Shannon Purser The Role of Sierra Burgess

The buzz is building for this Friday’s Netflix original film, Sierra Burgess is a Loser. It’s not just because the world is in love with leading man Noah Centineo (currently saturated with a never-ending internet infatuation due to his role in To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before) who plays Jamey in this teen romance, but because Barb is back. That’s right, season 1 Stranger Things star Shannon Purser is stepping into the leading lady role here and she’s doing a damn good job of it — even though the role she seemed destined to play almost slipped through her fingers.

“Everybody in town loved the Sierra script, so we met everybody,” the film’s casting director Tamara-Lee Notcutt explained to Decider of the fierce competition over the role of Sierra. The script, which comes from screenwriter Lindsey Beer and is based on the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, follows high schooler Sierra as she begins a text relationship with cute football player Jamey (Centineo) — only he thinks he’s texting with cheerleader Veronica (Kristine Froseth) who slipped him Sierra’s number as a joke.

“We saw loads of actresses and they wanted someone with a name but I kept coming back to Shannon,” Notcutt said. “I watched Stranger Things and became obsessed with her like everybody else. I was like, I want to cast that girl in something and I want to do it ASAP because I think she’s super special and I think it’s bullshit that she didn’t come back on the show. I knew she was gonna be fine but I really wanted it.”

One element an early draft of the script shared with the original was that the main character was self-conscious about their large nose, but Notcutt wasn’t convinced that was the key. “I was like, why does it have to be about her nose? It could be about anything, it could be about her weight, it could be about her hair color, it could be about so many things, because teenagers pick up on the most random things that shouldn’t bother you when you’re an adult but do when you’re a kid. A nose can be fixed so easily. You can get a nose job and it’s no big deal. People struggle with their weight all the time and it’s an identifiable thing with all women, regardless of being skinny or heavy or whatever in between and so that’s something even more relatable.” And so she brought up Purser once again, an actress the producers liked, but as Notcutt explained, “There were so many people that were coming after the job and some quite established actresses.”

Though it turned out that logistics would be an even bigger hurdle before Purser could land the role. The actress had a packed schedule between filming Riverdale and attending conventions for her Stranger Things role, which had her out of town and unavailable to impress the producers in person. And again, she’s just a few jobs into her career. “She’s still super fresh to it,” Notcutt admitted, which means when it came time for Pursuer to self-tape, she hadn’t exactly mastered that aspect of the auditioning process just yet.

“She was self-taping from a hotel room and I’d call her like, ‘No, do it again, do it like this.'” So as Notcutt prepped Pursuer as much as she could, the casting process rolled on. “We cast RJ as Dan and they’re like, ‘Okay we need to get who’s gonna be Sierra.’ I was like, it’s gotta be Shannon but she hadn’t come in because she wasn’t available.”

Which left Notcutt with no other options except her final Hail Mary attempt. “I called her manager and I was like, ‘Okay this is her last chance. She needs to just come in the room, I know she’ll win it if she just comes in.’ I said, ‘Just fly her in,’ and he went, ‘Oh, she hasn’t got any money.’ And I said, ‘Well I can’t get [the producers] to pay for it, just put it on your air miles, we’ll reimburse it,’ and he said, ‘Ugh, fine.’

“Her manager, god bless him, raked up his air miles, flew her out to LA for the day and she came in and blew everyone’s socks off. I was like, thank you! She walked out of the room and everyone was like, ‘Well it’s her,’ and I said, ‘Thank you very much, let’s go for it.’ And then Noah, we pulled him in like, ‘Get down here now!” He came in, read with her, and we were like, this is perfect.”

Screenwriter Lindsey Beer confirmed she had a similar experience with the auditioning process for the film, recalling,”We saw so many auditions for Sierra, I think we pretty much auditioned every girl of that age from Hollywood. Shannon, we obviously had seen her stuff from Stranger Things and we were hoping when she came in that was gonna be it, and it was. She was so charming that we just kind of knew.” 

Once you finally lay your eyes on Purser as Sierra this Friday, in a role that she simply feels so natural and endearing in as she embodies the unique teen, you’ll feel awfully similarly to Beer and Notcutt, who gushed of the actress, “She’s amazing. She’s such a special, talented girl. She can sing, she can act, she’s beautiful and she’s got such a great attitude. She’s such an advocator for body image. I’m really, really proud of her, she’s a great girl.”

Where to watch Sierra Burgess is a Loser