Perhaps you wouldn’t immediately associate Devon Sawa with a particular character: the actor, now forty-eight, was the human version of the friendly ghost Casper in Brad Silberling’s 1995 film of the same name, in a romantic scene where he delivered a line that entered the imagination of a generation that was in its childhood at the time. Now that Sawa has built a career as a character actor, not least in the Disney+ series Coven Academy, he told People how the association can weigh on him seriously at times, while naturally cherishing a grateful memory of the experience. First we observe the ‘incriminated’ scene.
Devon Sawa alias Casper is a bit tired of saying the same line to fans
Devon Sawa was sixteen years old (though he may have looked a little younger) when he briefly portrayed the human Casper in the 1995 live-action/CGI hybrid, a technical milestone, because it was the first Hollywood film featuring CGI-animated characters from Industrial Light & Magic, arriving a few months before Toy Story. Yet Sawa didn’t become a legend for these nerdy cinephile reasons; he became known for a scene in which the ghost returned to a momentary humanity and proclaimed his love for Kat (Christina Ricci), with a line that has lingered in everyone’s hearts. Perhaps a bit too much, because Sawa now reveals: “No matter what I do today, no matter how strong the project is, I’ll always have to tell someone at some point: ‘Can I hold you?’ There will always be some Casper stuff in my life. […] There was a moment in my life when I said: ‘I don’t want to talk about Casper!’ How dare you? I’m an artist, a performer!’ But in the end I had to accept it. It’s the reason I’m here. It’s what brought me to where I am today.”
Sawa, who hasn’t really stopped working since then, is in the cast of the forthcoming Return of the Living Dead by Steve Wolsh, the latest chapter in the horror saga, while playing the role of the magic teacher Peter Cole in the first season of the Disney+ series Coven Academy.
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