Zooey Deschanel reveals her former castmate Katie Holmes was first offered her Elf role

Zooey Deschanel just revealed her former castmate Katie Holmes was offered the role of Jovie in the 2003 Christmas comedy classic, Elf, before her.

At the time, the 45-year-old New Girl alum and the 47-year-old Dawson's Creek alum had just co-starred as college students in Stephen Gaghan's 2002 thriller Abandon, which flopped at the box office.

'When I met with Jon Favreau, the director, I walked in and he was like, "Oh you don't need to read. We just offered it to Katie Holmes,"' Deschanel recalled on Call Her Daddy Wednesday.

'And I was like, "Oh okay cool."'

Holmes wound up dropping out of the role as the deadpan department store employee due to 'some scheduling conflict' and Favreau called back the two-time Emmy nominee, who was only 21 and still starting out.

'I think the character was kind of meant to be, like, worked around whoever played her,' Deschanel explained.

'And they knew I sang because I had a cabaret act where I did, like, jazz standards and stuff, and so that kind of worked out with the character.'

Indeed, three songs were magically added to the film for the She & Him frontwoman to perform including the shower-set Baby, It's Cold Outside duet and Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town during the Central Park-set climax.

Deschanel remembers 'laughing out loud' while reading the script, but had no clue that Will Ferrell's first leading role in a movie would become so beloved and amass $228.9 million at the global box office.

'Anyone who's worked with him, like, there's no bad experiences with him. He's so nice. He's nice to everybody. He's so fun. He's like game for anything,' the Merv actress gushed.

'I like doing all the stuff in the department store because there's, like, so much, like, kind of farcical energy to that.'

Deschanel had already bleached her naturally dark locks in order to play a pop star in a project that never came to fruition, and she was told to keep it blonde for Elf.

'I'm not sure where that came from, but that's what I was told. So then I had to like maintain this, which takes like eight [hours],' the LA native groaned.

'I remember I had extensions and I, of course, was like young and dumb and I remember they glued the extensions in. I couldn't get them out and I was like trying to pull them and I, like, ripped my hair out. I had, like, short pieces like that long.'

The critically-acclaimed holiday flick - which spawned a Broadway musical still running in the West End - also featured James Caan, Mary Steenburgen, Ed Asner, Bob Newhart, Peter Dinklage and Amy Sedaris.

Deschanel brought up Holmes again when she was blasting the 'lazy' term 'manic pixie dream girl' originally coined in 2007 by The AV Club film critic Nathan Rabin.

'It was something a journalist used to describe Katie Holmes in Pieces of April, which was like an indie movie that went to Sundance,' the Grammy-nominated songstress lamented.

'And then since then they used it to describe Natalie Portman in Garden State and pretty much every character I ever played.'

Deschanel added: 'It started to also feel like an insult or something...this was a way to make this character that was meant to be highly, you know like, three-dimensional trying to make it one-dimensional.'

The three-time Golden Globe nominee's upcoming films include Kris Rey's Missouri-set comedy Trash Mountain and Sheri Elwood's indie comedy Heather of the Valley.

Deschanel also happens to be a nepo baby, having had a leg up in the industry thanks to her DP/director father Caleb Deschanel and actress mother Mary Jo Deschanel.

On the personal front, The Simpsons guest star welcomed two children - daughter Elsie, 10; and son Charlie, 8 - during her three-year marriage to second ex-husband Jacob Pechenik, which ended in 2020. 

In 2023, Deschanel got engaged to Property Brothers producer-star Jonathan Scott four years after meeting while filming a 2019 episode of Carpool Karaoke: The Series.