Neve Campbell
Neve Campbell is an actor, born 1973.
Neve Campbell was born in Guelph, Ontario in 1973 and worked in Canadian television before anyone in Los Angeles knew the name: The Kids in the Hall, the modelling series Catwalk, a small film called Bari. American television took her next, and Party of Five gave her Julia Salinger and years of practice at playing a young woman being asked to hold a family together.
Then came 1996, when she made The Craft and Scream in the same year and became a horror figure for the next thirty. What she brought to Sidney Prescott, and what the franchise has never found a replacement for, is fatigue. Sidney is not plucky. She is a woman who has been through this before and is furious about being asked again, and Campbell plays her guarded, tired and slightly unlikeable, which is why the character survived sequel after sequel while the rules around her kept changing. Her genre work carries Saturn Award recognition.
The rest of the career is a deliberate refusal to stand still: Wild Things and 54 in 1998, Three to Tango, Drowning Mona, Panic, the dance film The Company in 2003, the small dramas Closing the Ring and Partition. Television took over later, with LeAnn Harvey in House of Cards, Maggie McPherson in The Lincoln Lawyer and Raven in Twisted Metal, and Skyscraper put her in a blockbuster in 2018.
She returned as Sidney in 2022, and the catalogue has her back again for Scream 7 in 2026.
Movies (31)
- Scream 7 (2026)
- Scream (1996)
- Scream (2022)
- Scream 4 (2011)
- The Lion King II: Simba's Pride (1998)
- Scream 2 (1997)
- Scream 3 (2000)
- The Craft (1996)
- Wild Things (1998)
- Skyscraper (2018)
- 54 (1998)
- Clouds (2020)
- Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical (2006)
- Drowning Mona (2000)
- Still Screaming: The Ultimate Scary Movie Retrospective (2011)
- Partition (2007)
- Closing the Ring (2007)
- Panic (2000)
- The Canterville Ghost (1996)
- Blind Horizon (2003)
- Relative Strangers (2006)
- Sea Wolf (2009)
- Three to Tango (1999)
- Intimate Affairs (2002)
- Seduced and Abandoned (2013)
- The Company (2003)
- When Will I Be Loved (2004)
- Churchill: The Hollywood Years (2004)
- Bari (1994)
- Last Call (2002)
TV (10)
Where to start with Neve Campbell
Scream is the one to watch first, and the reason is Campbell rather than the mask: she plays the target as somebody with a history and a temper, which is what separates the film from the slashers it is making fun of. Follow it with Scream 4, the entry where Sidney comes home as a professional survivor and the film has something sour to say about that.
For the non-horror version, Party of Five is where the register came from, all restraint and responsibility, and The Craft shows her in the same year taking the smaller, sadder part instead of the lead. Wild Things is trash and knows it. The Company is the one almost nobody has seen, a nearly plotless dance film she took when nothing about her career required it. The Lincoln Lawyer is where the television work is strongest now.