Mrs. Britney Timberlake! Britney Spears had then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake on her mind all the time while filming the 2002 movie Crossroads. The pop superstar, who would split from Timberlake one year after the movie’s release, doodled his name in a prop notebook, and he was a frequent visitor to the Georgia set.
“I have the book. All she was writing was ‘Britney and Justin,’ all these little curlicues. It was like looking at a teenage girl’s musings — hearts and butterflies and Justin’s name,” director Tamra Davis revealed in a new interview with Broadly.
“It was just the most beautiful relationship, seeing the two of them together and how love-y they were. They were just so close, and she was such a supporter of his. He worked just as hard as her,” she added of Spears and the former *NSyncer. “It was like, she would be doing rehearsals and he would be doing rehearsals. They really knew that life together.”
Crossroads‘ producer Ann Carli and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes — who would go on to create beloved TV shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal — also opened up about Spears’ first movie role.
The coming-of-age flick focused on a young girl named Lucy (Spears) who embarks on a road trip to find her long-lost mom Caroline (Kim Cattrall). Lucy’s childhood friends Kit (Zoe Saldana) and Mimi (Taryn Manning) go along for the ride, and Lucy meets a dreamboat stranger named Ben (Anson Mount). Rhimes, for her part, believed that Spears was perfect to play Crossroads‘ leading lady.
“I was much more interested in the young woman that I met than the image that people had of her. She was a person, and I don’t think anyone at the time was looking at her — because it’s such a misogynistic society — as a person,” Rhimes explained. “The idea that we could portray her as a three-dimensional young woman was interesting to me. To have mean-girled her and turned her into a caricature would have been a mistake.”
Davis, however, wasn’t as confident that Spears, then 20, could pull off such a performance. That all changed though when she met the “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” singer one-on-one.
“I knocked on her hotel room door, and she opened it up, and she was wearing, like, a little pink T-shirt and little shorts, and she was just hilarious. She opened the door and she was like, ‘Man, I was hammered last night!’ I was like, ‘What! You’re Britney Spears, and you were hammered last night?'” Davis recalled.
“She was, like, the funniest, really good girlfriend-y type of girl. I realized she was this very sweet Southern girl with incredible manners, but she was running the whole thing,” she continued. “I loved watching her [be] in the center of this circle, and there wasn’t a guy in there telling her what to do. She was in command of the whole thing.”
Indeed, Spears was incredibly easy to work with, the group concurred. Her only requests? She wanted tuna Lunchables and edamame on standby, and asked production to pick her up at her home 30 minutes early every day for, yes, a Starbucks run.
Overall, Davis, Rhimes and Carli appeared to be in awe of Spears while in production. So much so, that a sequel isn’t out of the question.
“We’ve actually talked a little bit, in a weird way, about a sequel. There’s a lot of people [involved], and they’re really busy,” Carli said. “Who knows? I think it would be a lot of fun, but everybody’s in different places, from Taryn to Zoe to Britney to Shonda.”
