Her boyfriend has just cheated on her, leaving her wronged and distraught. Now on her own for the first time in who-knows-how-long, the girl will commit every act of rebellion she can think of: tattoos, belly button piercings… But being the victim to nearly every man she has encountered is too much, and she soon takes to the edge of an overpass, ready to end it all. Then, as the asshole ex approaches, she jumps… only to reveal it as a prank on the man who jilted her. And this was how Alicia Silverstone was discovered: dangling from a bungee cord and flipping off the viewer.
Let’s find out: What Happened to… Alicia Silverstone?
But to truly understand what happened to Alicia Silverstone, we go back to the beginning. And the beginning began when she was born on October 4th, 1976, in San Francisco, CA. Alicia Silverstone fell in love with the stage at an early age, even turning to modeling as a youth despite feeling she looked like a duck. She, too, was a self-proclaimed “tomboy,” later calling her constant Clueless costume changes “hell.” Even still, she was determined, taking acting classes in 8th grade and landing a Domino’s commercial in 1991. The following year, she got her first screen role as one of Kevin’s crushes on The Wonder Years. It was a one-off, but enough to make a mark.
The Crush & Aerosmith
In 1993, Alicia Silverstone was cast as a modern Lolita in The Crush. It was a forceful performance where she acted circles around Cary Elwes (OK, not hard, but still!). Right then and there, she was a star, winning both Best Villain and Best Breakthrough Performance at the MTV Movie Awards. She, too, earned a nod for Most Desirable Female, something she found icky since she was being deemed a sex symbol by leering pervs at just 16 years old.
Enter Aerosmith – who cast her in three consecutive music videos (although many think the videos came before The Crush), most notably “Cryin’” and “Crazy,” both of which were smash MTV favorites – after members saw The Crush. Really, it’s no surprise they were drawn to Silverstone, considering Steven Tyler once held guardianship over a 16-year-old lover… Despite her persona, Silverstone knew how to take control early on, emancipating herself at just 15 before filming on The Crush began so she could dedicate more hours to acting. She would quit high school her sophomore year and later launch a production company called First Kiss Productions, which highlights the sort of innocence that grounded her and made her an object of desire.
Following The Crush, Silverstone played Raquel Welch’s daughter in Torch Song before turning up in the “Cool and Crazy” episode of the experimental Showtime series Rebel Highway (1994). The following year brought Le Nouveau Monde (as another symbol of affection), low-level horror Hideaway, and a version of The Crush (yes, she played another seductive underage girl) called The Babysitter.
Clueless and stardom
After Amy Heckerling saw Silverstone in Aerosmith’s “Cryin’” video, she had to cast her as Cher Horowitz in Clueless (1995). Giving a pitch-perfect turn as the voice and fashion icon of a new generation, Alicia Silverstone had hit it with the widespread audience that had eluded her. With it came award recognition from everybody from the Blockbuster Entertainment Awards to the National Board of Review. Silverstone says she never wanted fame. But that’s what she got – and with that also came a $10 million contract with Columbia-TriStar.
Passing through True Crime (1996) as an aspiring cop, Silverstone was given her first big-budget movie: Batman & Robin(1997). This was just the sort of blockbuster she was being positioned for. She, too, was now an adult, although this brought her a new set of issues: namely, the industry felt comfortable body-shaming her, with some outlets saying she was too fat for her outfit. Only decades later would a “Justice for Batgirl” campaign launch online. As she put it, “They would make fun of my body when I was younger… I knew that it was not right to make fun of someone’s body shape, that doesn’t seem like the right thing to be doing to a human.” Not even remotely worse but still damaging, she won the Razzie for Worst Supporting Actress. Through her new deal – and First Kiss Productions – Silverstone co-led Excess Baggage, a light movie that could further show off her comedic chops, another Razzie nod be damned.
Batman & Robin and career slump
Around this time, Alicia Silverstone became an activist for animal rights, turning to veganism and visiting everywhere from Africa to Peru to help elephants and the rainforest. She would even publish a vegan cookbook a decade later. Such activists can often be abrasive… or weird. Silverstone took her animal love too far in 2012 when she filmed herself chewing food to spit in her baby son’s mouth like a bird. To be sure, Silverstone has come to a different kind of notoriety for her online behavior and parenting “tips.” In 2022, she announced she still sleeps with her 11-year-old son, saying that’s how animals do it in nature. She, too, suggested that eating anything other than what’s in her diet would bypass the need for any kind of medicine. Of course, a strictly vegan diet isn’t the worst thing Alicia Silverstone has put in her mouth, as in August 2024, she recorded a video of herself eating a mysterious berry… which many have pinpointed as the toxic Jerusalem berry…
But while we wait to find out if Alicia Silverstone poisoned herself for TikTok clout, let’s jump back to the past once more. 1999 brought the fun, innocent fantasy romance Blast from the Past, marking what would end up being one of her last trademark roles. 2000 saw her playing against type – and not that well – in Branagh’s adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost. This ties into her actual time on stage, first explored as a star in 2002 playing Elaine (against Jason Biggs) in The Graduate, although she tried it out in 1993. She later did a pair of Mamet plays in 2006 (Boston Marriage) and 2007 (Speed-the-Plow), part of a surprising string of stage work seen as recently as 2015. These allowed Silverstone to show she was still worth watching. Her movies? Not as much…
In 2001, Silverstone began lending her voice to things like Mickey’s Magical Christmas, later doing 2014’s Space Dogs: Adventures to the Moon, 2014’s Jungle Shuffle, 2015’s The Nutcracker Sweet, 2017’s Jeff & Some Aliens, and 2021’s Masters of the Universe: Revelation. Her biggest success on this front was as the lead character for the first two seasons of Brace Face, earning a Daytime Emmy nod. She would later earn another for The Baby-Sitters Club (2020–2021), playing an adult in a show that otherwise would have fit in well with the earlier TV series in the ‘90s.
Comeback roles
TV would have seemed to suit Silverstone quite well, landing Miss Match in 2003, playing a matchmaker on the one-season series. Even still, she earned a Golden Globe nod for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy. But if you thought that was short-lived, consider her failed pilots for Queen B (2005), Pink Collar (2006), The Singles Table (2007), and The Bad Mother’s Handbook (2008). There was also the Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie Candles on Bay Street (2006) and, later, a four-episode arc on season one of Suburgatory (2012), a one-season starring role on American Woman (2018), and a random appearance on American Horror Stories (2022). But none of these were memorable – either short-lived or virtually non-existent – just frequent blips in her career.
And her movie work was paling, too: Global Heresy (2002); crime comedy Scorched (2003); Scooby-Doo 2 (2005); Beauty Shop (2005); Silence Becomes You (2006); spy movie Stormbreaker (2006); The Art of Getting By (2011); Butter(2011); Ass Backwards (2013); Greek fantasy Gods Behaving Badly (2013); dramedy Angels in Stardust (2014); porn biopic King Cobra (2016); the Hallmark-level Who Gets the Dog? (2016); a Diary of a Wimpy Kid sequel (2016), replacing Rachael Harris; coming-of-age The Tribes of Palos Verde (2017); 2018’s Book Club (the movie your mother-in-law saw with all her gal pals); horror flicks The Lodge (2019) and Perpetrator (2023); the overall decent comedy Bad Therapy (2020); a fun but hapless role in Sisters of the Groom (2020); thriller Last Survivors (2022), the middle-ager-offering-wisdom-staged Senior Year (2022); Mustache (2023); and Benicio del Toro reunion Reptile (2023) (which is an underrated gem).
And while we flew through those titles like a carousel in the attic, there’s a reason for that: face it, you’ve never heard of most of these. That’s not to say Silverstone didn’t give valiant goes in movies like Catfight (2016) – a progressive role that saw her part of a lesbian couple – or Vamps (2012) – reuniting with Heckerling – or The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) – as the mother of Barry Keoghan (no easy task) – but long gone was the popularity of Alicia Silverstone. It was all now like seeing Cher Horowitz in the self-checkout lane.
And, really – despite the captive grip she had on audiences with her Aerosmith videos and The Crush – it all comes back to Clueless. Even today, Alicia Silverstone continues to pay tribute to the movie through Super Bowl commercials and TikTok recreations. And it’s what we love her for, although who could be against seeing her reprise her “Crazy” character? As she put it, “It never gets old, so that’s the good news. People always say, ‘Oh you must be so sick of it.’ But what’s there to be sick of? People liking the movie you’re in? It truly doesn’t get better.”
Alicia Silverstone is far past the point of meeting her dreams by working with Bertolucci and Scorsese and Pacino like she always wanted, but could we ever forget her and her role in ‘90s cinema? As if!
