During her six season run on The Waltons, Mary Beth McDonough became synonymous with her character, the friendly, outgoing Erin Walton. But McDonough came quite close to playing a very, very different iconic young female character instead. As she revealed during a panel at the MidSouth Nostalgia Festival in Olive Branch, Mississippi, earlier this month, McDonough was once in the running to play Regan MacNeil, the 12-year-old girl whose horrifying possession is at the heart of 1973’s The Exorcist.
As McDonough recalled, she was a tween enrolled in dance classes in her hometown of Los Angeles, when she heard that about an opportunity to give acting a try: “About then, producers of The Homecoming, the pilot forThe Waltons, were looking for red-headed kids because creator Earl Hamner’s family was all redheads.”