Scary Movie: What the Original Cast Have Been Up to Since the First Film

With Naked Gun and Spinal Tap making their own surprising returns in 2025 and a new Spaceballs on the way next year, we can safely say that spoof movies are back in fashion. 

Horror fans in particular have been counting down the days until the release of the new Scary Movie this summer — a legendary spoof franchise that, if the trailer is anything to go by, certainly hasn’t lost its nerve since Scary Movie 5 was released 13 years ago.

Along with all the bad taste and profanity, the trailer also confirmed the return of many of the surviving (and non-surviving) cast members from the 2000 original. For some of them, the franchise remains their defining role, but many have gone on to have quite interesting careers. In the list below, you can learn what the original cast have been up to since 2000, use our guide to find some of their best-known work on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere. 

Anna Faris

For Anna Faris, her starring role in Scary Movie — as Final Girl Cindy Campbell — basically kick-started a banner decade in her career. In that time, Faris reprised her role as Cindy a further three times while also starring in other comedies like The Hot Chick and The House Bunny. In between, she found the time to take on some smaller parts in movies that went on to become Oscar-nominated classics: namely, Lost in Translation and Brokeback Mountain.

Faris also landed a recurring role on the final season of Friends and, in 2009, entered what became a ten-year marriage to Chris Pratt. During that time, they acted together on three occasions, including in the impressively deranged (and impressively lambasted) Movie 43. Along with all that, Faris has lent her recognisable voice to several animated movies, like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and its sequel. Listen out for her later this year in Toy Story 5. 

Marlon Wayans

Looking back, the year 2000 now looks like an interesting crossroads for Marlon Wayans. A few months before the release of Scary Movie, the actor, co-writer and producer gave what is probably still his finest dramatic performance in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream.   For better and worse, however, the actor took the success of Scary Movie and ran with it, basically becoming the Alfred Hitchcock of 21st-century spoof movies as a result.

Wayans had already written and starred in Don’t Be a Menace… in 1996, but Scary Movie took things to a whole new level. Since the original, he collaborated with his brothers on 50 Shades of Black, A Haunted House, Dance Flick and White Chicks, while playing a version of himself on his semi-autobiographical sitcom, marlon. However, the last few years have seen a slight change of pace, with the actor picking up roles in movies like Air, Respect and Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks. Let’s just say, he keeps things unpredictable. 

Regina Hall

Weighing up the careers of the various Scary Movie alumni, nobody from the original cast has appeared in more movies I personally love than Regina Hall. In the same year that she burst onto the scene with her performance as Brenda Meeks, the actress also appeared in the Sundance classic Love & Basketball — suggesting a career balance between high and low-brow entertainment that she’s mostly managed to sustain. 

Outside of starring roles in hugely successful comedies like Think Like a Man and Girls Trip, Hall has found the time to appear in micro-budget indies like People, Places, Things and the excellent 2018 movie, Support the Girls. Last year, despite having one of the quietest roles, she stole every scene she was in in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and was unlucky not to be recognised by the Academy for the performance. Look out for her opposite Marc Maron in the intriguing-sounding In Memoriam next year. 

Jon Abrahams

Since playing Cindy’s boyfriend, Bobby Prinz, in the original Scary Movie — a role he is set to reprise this year, despite apparently dying in that movie —  Jon Abrahams has continued to work steadily in the business, picking up roles here and there in everything from House of Wax (that horror movie with Jessica Simpson in it) to the more recent Terrifier 3 — a movie that, according to the trailer, is set to be parodied in Scary Movie 6.

Looking back, 2000 looked like it was going to be a real launchpad for Abrahams — after breaking out with small roles in the ‘90s classics Kids and The Faculty, that year saw him appear in both Meet the Parents and Boiler Room as well as Scary Movie — but it didn’t quite work out. With his recent turn as Frank Preminger in Wonder Man and his upcoming role in SM6, however, who knows what the next few years might bring.

Shannon Elizabeth

After working in the industry for a few years, Shannon Elizabeth had a small (and very late-‘90s coded) career breakout when she played Nadia, the horny Czech exchange student, in American Pie. Soon after, she landed the role of the doomed prom queen, Buffy Gilmore, in Scary Movie and basically continued from there.

Since then, Elizabeth reprised her role as Nadia in two more Pie movies and has continued to work steadily ever since — though I doubt you’ve seen too many of the movies. If you remember her from anything other than those early projects, it will likely be her small part as Harriet in Love Actually — one of the comically beautiful women whom Colin meets on his trip to America.  

Shawn Wayans

Despite being the slightly less well-known of the Wayans brothers, Shawn has basically worked in tandem with his brother (both as an actor and writer) on many of Marlon’s most successful movies. 

Since playing the jock, Ray Wilkins, in Scary Movie, however, Shawn (the elder of the two) hasn’t really strayed from their collaborations — think movies like White Chicks, Dance Flick, and Little Man. He will, of course, be reprising his role as Ray in the upcoming sixth instalment and will also be reprising his role as Kevin in an apparent upcoming sequel to White Chicks. 

Dave Sheridan

When Dave Sheridan returns to his role as Doofy Gilmore in Scary Movie 6 this summer, it will mark a long-awaited return to the big screen for the actor. Don’t get us wrong, Sheridan has continued to pop up in several Wayans projects since the release of Scary Movie, but the majority of his output in the intervening years looks decidedly straight-to-VOD.

He did land a few small roles in significant movies in that time, however, like playing a cop in The Devil’s Rejects and a bartender in Horrible Bosses. To most movie fans, however, he will always be Doug, the moustachioed asshole in Terry Swigoff’s late Gen-X classic, Ghost World. 

Lochlyn Munro

The problem with landing your first named role in a Clint Eastwood flick (especially if it happens to be an Oscar-winning classic like Unforgiven) is that it’s always going to be hard to top it. Indeed, Lochlyn Munro admittedly never quite reached those heights again in his career, but he’s worked more than steadily in the years since on both the big and small screen.

Outside of his continued collaborations with the Wayans (including playing Buffy’s boyfriend Greg in both Scary Movie and the upcoming sixth instalment), Munro has amassed a whopping 289 credits on IMDb — with, according to the site, another 15 set for release in the next few years. If you know him from anything from that time, it’s likely for his 51 appearances as Hal Cooper, the newspaper editor and husband of Alice, on Riverdale. 

Carmen Electra

To borrow a Ringer-ism, Carmen Electra is probably the most 2000 thing about Scary Movie. From that movie on, the Playboy-model-turned-Baywatch-star continued to regularly pop up — playing a kind of exaggerated version of herself, and being a very good sport about it — in comedies like Starsky & Hutch and basically every spoof from Meet the Spartans to Epic Movie.

Now widely regarded as a ‘00s cultural icon, Electra continues to appear as herself on a wide variety of reality and scripted TV shows.