For five seasons on The Brady Bunch, Eve Plumb was the middle daughter who sighed “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” and never quite got her turn. What most fans never knew is that while Jan Brady was still on the air, the girl who played her walked into a casting office to read for the most frightening role of the decade: the possessed child in The Exorcist.
Plumb, who was born April 29, 1958, in Burbank and is now 68, has been talking about that audition this year as she promotes her memoir, Happiness Included: Jan Brady and Beyond. Her verdict on losing the part is blunt, and it has nothing to do with regret. It also turns out The Exorcist was not the only horror film she came close to making.
How Did Jan Brady End Up Reading For ‘The Exorcist’?
The answer starts at home. Plumb’s parents, Neely and Flora Plumb, were protective of their daughter, but they did not believe in keeping hard material away from her. Speaking at a fan Q&A in New York City for her book, she said, “They also let me audition for The Exorcist, which I had read,” and added, “They didn’t want to ever hide anything from me,” according to Parade.
She really had read it. In Happiness Included, Plumb writes that she got through William Peter Blatty’s novel before the audition even though she was young, and that she read her lines for director William Friedkin in what she calls a “gravel-crunching tone.” Picture the girl who wailed about being stuck in the middle growling demon dialogue across a desk, and you have some idea how far that reading was from Jan. Plumb has said it was only a reading, so she doesn’t believe she was ever filmed.
She was one of a very long line. More than 500 young actresses read for the part of Regan MacNeil, and the girls who reportedly tried out included Laura Dern, Kim Basinger and Melanie Griffith, Parade and Yahoo reported. Jamie Lee Curtis was in the mix too. Curtis has said on The Drew Barrymore Show that the film’s producer wanted her to audition, but her mother, Janet Leigh, turned the offer down. Plumb’s parents, by contrast, let her go.
Who Got The Part Instead?
The role went to Linda Blair, who was 13 when she auditioned. The Exorcist opened in December 1973, with Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow and Jason Miller, and it made Blair a household name almost overnight. She earned an Academy Award nomination for the part, and she went on to play Regan again in Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977 and in The Exorcist: Believer in 2023. Blair, now 67, still turns up at horror fan conventions, and the role has followed her everywhere since.
Plumb has thought about what that kind of fame costs. Speaking in October 2026 on the podcast Behind the Awards With Eila Mell and Bruce Gotlieb, she said, “I have compassion for what the movie did for Linda Blair and how it would be the role the press would never let her leave behind,” Parade reported. Coming from someone who has spent more than half a century answering questions about Jan Brady, that line carries some weight.
Plumb had her own way of escaping the typecasting trap. In 1976, with her parents’ blessing, she took the lead in the NBC film Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, playing a teenager who ends up on the streets of Hollywood. It was about as far from the Brady house as television allowed, and it nearly led her into a second horror movie.
The Horror Film That Went To Jamie Lee Curtis
A few years later, Plumb was in the running for the lead in the 1980 slasher Prom Night. Producer Peter Simpson told the horror site The Terror Trap in 2004, “One of the girls we interviewed was Eve Plumb… she came in and met with us,” according to Parade’s account of the film’s history.
Director Paul Lynch has said Plumb was a frontrunner for the part of Kim Hammond until he got what he called an “odd call” from the manager of a young actress fresh off Halloween. Once Jamie Lee Curtis went after the role, Lynch recalled, “the girl from the TV series was gone, and it was now Jamie Lee Curtis.” So the same actress whose mother kept her away from The Exorcist ended up taking the scream queen part that might have been Jan’s.
Plumb kept working anyway. She returned to the family in The Brady Brides, A Very Brady Christmas and The Bradys, made her New York stage debut in 2010, and has spent more than 20 years as a painter showing her work in galleries. In 2019 she joined her TV siblings to restore the real Brady house for HGTV’s A Very Brady Renovation. She has been married to business consultant Ken Pace since 1995. Readers who remember her as the most popular Brady of all may recall that Jan once got more fan mail than her five TV siblings combined.
Why Is Eve Plumb So Glad She Lost ‘The Exorcist’?
Her honest answer is that the movie scared her half to death. Plumb is not a horror fan, and when she finally saw The Exorcist in a theater, she was so frightened that she slept in her mother’s bed for the next couple of nights, she told the podcast. That is a remarkable thing to admit about a film she once hoped to star in.
So when the hosts asked whether she wished things had gone differently, Plumb didn’t hesitate. “Yeah, I’m so glad I didn’t get that,” she said, as reported by Parade. “It’s a pretty awful movie. Terrified me.” People also picked up her answer.
Fifty-three years later, the girl who couldn’t sleep alone after seeing it is still Jan Brady to millions, and she seems perfectly happy about that. As for the role she lost to Linda Blair, Plumb sounds like a woman who got exactly the career she wanted, with a lot fewer nightmares. Fans who want to see where the rest of her TV family stands today can catch up on the ‘Brady Bunch’ cast members still with us.
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