Bryan Singer auditioned a couple hundred young men and chose 14-year-old Brad Renfro, saying of him, "Brad was the brightest, the most intense and the most real. Not only could he have the intensity when we wanted, there was a hollowness that he could convey, and by the end of the picture he had to become this empty vessel." Portraying a manipulative character temporarily influenced Renfro, who said that people around him were worried about his state of mind. Renfro said of his performance, "It's a trip I have to take. People just kind of have to leave me alone when I'm doing it. It's my job." Singer described his impression of the character: "I don't believe for one minute that [Todd Bowden] was pure as the driven snow. The capacity to blackmail an old man -- obviously there's a search for something going on that's a good hard step beyond innocence. I think he had it within him, some emptiness that needed fulfillment and taken to a new place, a new direction. His school, his parents, his environment weren't doing it for him. This particular individual came along before some other, but it perhaps could have been drugs, it could have been rape. Todd was probably not a very good guy. But that kind of bad guy can exist within a lot more people than we realize."

Film

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