Ashley Tisdale Turned Down Vampire Diaries & Pretty Little Liars For a Show No One Remembers
The next time you are beating yourself up over a bad decision, think about how Ashley Tisdale must have felt all these years.
The superpower every actor wants is to know exactly what projects are going to be big hits and pursue their roles accordingly. Thanks to their great role picking skills, many previously unknown actors have become huge stars and enjoyed fantastic careers — but sometimes, the situation can be quite the opposite, with promising actors choosing bad projects over successful ones.
The best example of this poor decision-making is Ashley Tisdale, who achieved mainstream success at a very young age but missed the opportunity to become an international icon by turning down not one, but two iconic roles.
In the 2000s, Tisdale was a rising star on the Disney Channel. Moving on from teen sitcoms to young adult programming, the actress had all the potential to become an even bigger TV celebrity. During that time, Ashley had been approached a lot to take part in new projects — among the roles she was offered were Hanna Marin on Freeform's Pretty Little Liars and Elena Gilbert on The CW's The Vampire Diaries.
However, the young star turned down both roles because she wanted to focus on her work on another The CW show, Hellcats — a comedy-drama about a college cheerleading squad and the lives and relationships of its members. The protagonist, Marti Perkins, is a pre-law student who has to join the squad to get an athletic scholarship. Tisdale played Savannah Monroe, the captain of the team who would do anything to win the cheerleading championship.
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The show premiered on The CW in September 2010 and ran for only one season of 22 episodes before being canceled and forgotten. Both critics and viewers panned the series, which has a 6.7/10 IMDb rating and a 44% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
At the same time, Pretty Little Liars and The Vampire Diaries took off and soon became huge hits with massive fan bases, running for seven and eight seasons respectively.
Ashley Benson, who landed the role of Hanna Marin, and Nina Dobrev, who got the part of Elena Gilbert, saw their careers skyrocket. Sadly, Ashely Tisdale hasn't had many projects since the mid-2000s, mostly voicing animated series, and has sort of faded into obscurity.