Someone else voiced the ghost in Casper — Devon Sawa is the one still stuck with it
Thirty years, a horror franchise and an Eminem video later, Devon Sawa is still the boy from Casper. He is barely in it.
Devon Sawa has made his peace with Casper, more or less. In an interview with People published on 10 October 2026, the 48-year-old, currently playing a warlock professor in Freeform's Coven Academy, admitted there was a stretch when he refused to talk about the 1995 film at all. "There was a time in my life I was like, 'I don't wanna talk about Casper,'" he said. These days the position is simpler: "I gotta embrace it." The role, he added, is what got him where he is.
He also knows exactly what every fan encounter will end with.
"Doesn't matter what I do nowadays. It doesn't matter how cool the project is, I will always have to say, 'Can I keep you?' to somebody at some point."
— Devon Sawa, to People
Fair enough. Except there is an awkward detail in that sentence, and it is the word "always".
How little of Casper is actually Devon Sawa
For almost the entire running time, Casper is not Devon Sawa. The friendly ghost is a computer-generated character, and the voice coming out of him belongs to Malachi Pearson, credited as "Voice of Casper". Sawa is credited as "Casper on Screen", and he only turns up near the end, when the ghost briefly becomes a real boy again for one dance with Christina Ricci's Kat. That is where "Can I keep you?" comes from.
How brief is brief? Sawa has never oversold it. When director Brad Silberling live-tweeted the film for its 25th anniversary in May 2020, Sawa chipped in with: "I was in Casper for 30 secs." That is a joke at his own expense rather than a stopwatch reading, but nobody has ever accused the part of being long. He used the same thread to thank Ricci for helping him land it.
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The film itself was no cameo. Casper took around $288 million worldwide on a $55 million budget and it has been a Halloween fixture on the telly ever since.
The role Devon Sawa can never escape is one he spends most of his own film not playing.
What failed to replace it
Sawa did not exactly spend the next 30 years hiding. A quick list of things that, in theory, should have taken over:
- Final Destination (2000): He plays the lead, Alex Browning, the student whose premonition about a plane explosion kicks off a franchise that has now run to six films.
- Stan (2000): He is the obsessive fan in Eminem's video, writing letters nobody answers, in a role that turned "stan" into everyday slang.
- Chucky (2021–2024): He played several different characters across three series of the TV show.
A leading role in a horror franchise, the face of one of the most famous music videos ever made, and a cult TV run. None of it has replaced a ghost he did not voice and one dance at the very end.
That is not really a complaint from Sawa any more. In Coven Academy, which premiered on Freeform on 1 October with the full first season streaming on Disney+ and Hulu the next day, he plays Mr Cole, a charismatic warlock teacher at a New Orleans boarding school for witches. He has said he hopes for a second season.
If it comes, Mr Cole will have more lines than Casper's real boy ever did. Somebody will still ask Sawa to say just the one.
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