Credit: Far Out / Super Festivals
Fri 21 August 2026 1:30, UK
Over the past few years, Rosario Dawson has become a franchise machine, playing characters in two of Disney’s biggest properties: Claire Temple in Daredevil and Ashoka Tano in various Star Wars projects.
There’s more to her career than just the ‘House of Mouse’, however, as she’s also appeared in musicals, video games, and high-profile music videos, and one film that rarely comes up in discussions of Dawson’s filmography is Clerks II.
Released 12 years after Kevin Smith’s game-changing comedy, the story picks up the story of Brian O’Halloran’s Dante Hicks and Jeff Anderson’s Randal Graves and their search for work after their store burns down, which leads them to working at Mooby’s, a McDonald’s-style fast food restaurant, where t they meet Dawson’s character, Becky, the restaurant’s manager and an eventual love interest for Dante.
In an interview with Radio Free to promote the film, Smith revealed that Dawson was someone he’d wanted to work with for a very long time, and he was actually unable to believe his ears when she agreed to the project, joking, “She must have lost a bet with somebody”, before adding, “Then you meet her and you talk to her, and you find out that she’s got real varied, disparate interests in film. Like she’s not a careerist.”
Smith obviously got to know Dawson quite well while working together, because she told him something that she’d never revealed publicly before, as he recalled, “She [says] her biggest regret in film in her career was getting cut out of The Devil’s Rejects, the Rob Zombie movie. She loves horror movies, she loves Rob Zombie.”
Released in 2005, The Devil’s Rejects is the second film from rockstar-turned-director Rob Zombie, serving as the sequel to House of 1000 Corpses, the movie that introduced the world to the murderous backwoods cult, the Firefly family.
The new story frames the surviving members as antiheroes, fleeing the pursuit of a ruthless sheriff determined to bring them to justice, and Dawson filmed a brief cameo in which she appeared as a nurse tending to Dr Satan, a prominent member of the family, injured in a police shootout. He would have woken up on the operating table and then killed the poor nurse by ripping out her throat, which would have led to Satan playing a larger role in the main story, but when it was decided to cut him, Dawson’s character got cut too.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Regardless, four years later, she finally got the chance to work with Mr Zombie, lending her voice to the character of Velvet von Black in The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, an adult animated film that he directed, co-wrote, and co-produced, but unfortunately, critics widely agreed that it wasn’t as good as The Devil’s Rejects.
I’d love to say that this was the only time Dawson was cut from a movie, but she recently revealed that she had filmed a scene as Claire Temple for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, a scene that stayed on the cutting room floor, leaving her out of one of 2026’s biggest films.
