Britney Spears Sobs In Gut-Wrenching Audition Tape For ‘The Notebook’

Britney Spears‘ audition tape for The Notebook will have you saying, “Gimme more.” After the pop star revealed she was “glad” she lost the lead role to Rachel McAdams, Hollywood casting director Matthew Barry shared her tear-filled audition with The Daily Mail.

The two-and-a-half-minute reading, which took place in 2002, features Spears speaking as Allie Hamilton to an off-camera Ryan Gosling, who was already cast as Noah Calhoun. The emotional scene found Allie telling Noah she was going to marry Lon — a role that later went to James Marsden.

“I’m not staying,” Spears says in the video. “I tried to call you to tell you that I wasn’t going to stay — but nobody answered the phone. Look, Noah. I can’t be here. Not the way I feel about you, it’s not fair to Lon. Noah, you can’t marry two people. And I’m marrying Lon, so I should go, okay?”

Spears, whose eyes well up with tears, continues, “I prayed for you to die in the war, really. Well, not die. I would have felt completely horrible if you would’ve died. But I kinda didn’t want you to be alive anymore because I couldn’t bear the thought of you being with somebody else, or of us never seeing each other again. So I gotta go, okay?”

Reflecting on the audition, Barry told The Daily Mail that Spears “wasn’t just good, she was phenomenal.”

“It was a tough decision,” he continued. “Britney blew us all away. Our jaws were on the floor. I was blown away. Absolutely blown away. She brought her A-game that day.”

Barry continued, “Britney beat out several of the top female actresses at the time. Scarlett Johansson, Claire Danes, Kate Bosworth, Amy Adams, Jaime King and Mandy Moore auditioned for this role. Britney beat out all of them. Everybody who was anybody that year wanted this part.”

While the role ultimately went to McAdams, Spears writes in her upcoming memoir The Woman in Me that she had no hard feelings about missing out on the part.

“Even though it would have been fun to reconnect with Ryan Gosling after our time on The Mickey Mouse Club, I’m glad I didn’t do it,” she admits in the book. “If I had, instead of working on my album ‘In the Zone’ I’d have been acting like a 1940s heiress day and night.”

The pop sensation, whose career on the big screen started and ended with Crossroads, further opened up about the decision to walk away from acting.

“I think I started Method acting — only I didn’t know how to break out of my character,” she writes in the excerpt, per People. “I really became this other person. Some people do Method acting, but they’re usually aware of the fact that they’re doing it. But I didn’t have any separation at all.”

The Woman in Me officially releases on Oct. 24.