Vivica A. Fox’s Young and Restless Role Landed Her Independence Day Audition

Vivica A. Fox broke out with her role in 1996’s Independence Day, but it almost didn’t happen because of The Young and the Restless. On the Sept. 2 episode of Legacy Talk with Lena Waithe, Fox, 61, reflected on how she got cast in the movie after a lot of hard work and a little luck.

Waithe, 41, asked if Fox had “any inkling” that Independence Day would become as big as it did.

“Yes,” Fox admitted. “I had to audition six times to get the part because I was on a soap opera, Young and the Restless, at the time. And I had no movie credits,” she remembered. 

Fox had previously starred on the soaps Days of Our Lives and Generations before joining Y&R in 1994 as Stephanie Simmons. But she had also just done an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, playing “the date from hell” alongside Will Smith, who had already been cast as Independence Day’s lead.

“So when I heard about Independence Day, because everybody and their mama wanted to be in this movie because we heard it was gonna be big,” Fox said. She called her agent and asked why she wasn’t being called in when she had “just worked with Will and killed it.”

“And they were like, honey, you’re on a soap opera. This is gonna be a $60 million movie. So sorry.”

But that wasn’t the end of the story. “Thank God the producer’s wife, Bill Fay, his wife was pregnant at the time, sitting at home watching Young and the Restless, which I was on,” Fox said. An endorsement from Fay’s wife got her a call into the audition room.  

She arrived for her audition to play Jasmine Dubrow — the girlfriend of Smith’s Captain Steven Hiller and an exotic dancer — in an outfit she thought was appropriate for the part. “I went in the audition with a tight white patent leather jumpsuit on. She was a stripper,” Fox said. 

After she read the lines, the casting director told her, “You know, it’s a good thing you can act… because that outfit is totally wrong.”

“I said, ‘Oh, well, she’s a stripper.’ She goes, ‘She’s a stripper, but that’s not who she is,’ ” Fox remembered. The casting director ordered her to watch 1994’s Speed and to try to channel some of the energy of Sandra Bullock’s character. 

“When I came back in, I had on this cute little dress with combat boots and some little anklet, little little stuff around it. And as soon as I walked in, she said, ‘You did your homework.’ And from that point forward, she fought for me to get the role,” Fox remembered. Still, it took six auditions and a screen test to secure it.

At the movie’s premiere, she remembered director Roland Emmerich telling her, “It’s a good thing you did good because my first choice, your first day of filming, my first choice said she was available. But I looked at your dailies and you lit up the screen.”

Independence Day became a massive success. It was the highest-grossing film of 1996 and the second-highest-grossing movie of all time at the time, behind Jurassic Park. 

But Fox told Waithe that when the movie was released, she was on the set of 1997’s Booty Call, filming in Toronto. “It’s an experience I’m glad, to be honest with you, that I wasn’t in America, because my head would’ve got this big, which it got big anyway, until I had to stick a pen in it and bring it back down to earth,” she said. 

Waithe asked if, with the movie’s success, she was able to feel “thankful” for the career moment that she’d “fought for.”

“To be honest with you, I did five films back to back to back. So I tell people now when I look back at my career, I miss so many moments, because I was on the treadmill of success,” Fox said. She was so worried about “what’s next” that she didn’t “take the time” to enjoy her success.  In addition to Booty Call, she also starred in 1996’s Set It Off, 1997’s Batman & Robin and Soul Food, 1998’s Why Do Fools Fall in Love and 1999’s Idle Hands. 

“I was extremely driven because I started late. I didn’t start acting until I was 24,” Fox said. It took years for her to learn career balance.