If you remember Party of Five, you remember Julia Salinger, the sensitive middle child who held her fractured family together through thick and thin while running a restaurant and navigating teen heartbreak. Neve Campbell was just 20 years old when she played the role in 1994. Now, 32 years later, she’s 52, and somehow she still looks very much the same.
Before she played one of the most famous TV orphans, Campbell envisioned a very different life for herself in ballet. After watching The Nutcracker as a child, she trained at the National Ballet School of Canada. She once explained that dance helped her cope when words often failed her. “I wasn’t very good at speaking my mind… And I found this outlet where I could express myself without actually really having to say what I was thinking. So, I found a real passion for it because of that, and then it just grew,” she told IGN.
Acting eventually offered her the same release.
Of course, her ’90s résumé is the most impressive. It includes ads for Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Tampax. Then sketch comedy on The Kids in the Hall. She even showed up in a kids horror movie (way before Scream) called Are You Afraid of the Dark? Then she got her first important role on TV as Daisy McKenzie on Catwalk, a role that she confessed to Entertainment Weekly is the “one that I usually try to forget”.
Every career has to start somewhere, though, right?
Party of Five, of course, changed her life… forever. The Fox drama series ran for six seasons and shocked the everyone by winning the 1996 Golden Globe for Best Drama. Campbell carried Julia’s heavy storylines that tackled family, addiction, abuse, and terrible boyfriends.
Of course, if you ask anyone today, they’ll say they know her as Sidney Prescott from Wes Craven’s Scream – which is incredibly ironic since she confessed that she “used to hate scary movies.” Today, she’s known as a scream queen, which basically makes her horror royalty. Speaking to Jamie Lee Curtis for Variety, she admitted she thought she was “just making a horror movie,” adding, “it’s just amazing what can come out of something when you have no idea.”
That little horror movie turned into a franchise, four sequels, and now Scream 7, arriving Feb. 27, 2026. Neve Campbell continues to return as Sidney Prescott all these years later.
But what happened to her between her appearances in Scream sequels, you might ask? Well, after the early 2000s spotlight, Cambell stepped back for a while. A long while, actually. She married, moved to London, divorced, had a few kids, and eventually returned to Hollywood years later. When Stephen Colbert asked why she left at the height of it all, she shrugged: “I just needed a minute… It was a long minute. It was a good minute.” She later explained the burnout more bluntly. “In my 20s, it all hit so fast and so big that it was a little overwhelming… I was constantly being offered horror films… Or bad romantic comedies. I just wasn’t interested.”
In 2026, Sidney returns in Scream as a mom herself, confronting the trauma that started with Maureen Prescott’s murder back in 1996. Campbell told TotalFilm that it’s “a whole full-circle story for Sidney… She gets to sort of heal that wound.”
Julia Salinger grew up. Sidney Prescott survived. But Neve Campbell is still around. And while she hasn’t changed much physically, everything else about her has.
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