Devon Sawa turned 48 this year but his résumé still feels like a decade-long reel of ’90s milestones. He leapt into the public eye as the teenage heart-throb in the 1995 family-fantasy Casper resurfaced as the nervous high-school senior Alex Browning in Final Destination and now inhabits the role of a sorcerous professor in Disney+’s Coven Academy. Between those landmarks, the Canadian actor has cultivated a set of eccentric beliefs and stories that he shares in recent interviews, ranging from a personal theory about airplane safety to a long-standing struggle with his ghostly debut.
Casper’s lingering fame and a reluctant reconciliation
When Casper premiered, the film’s blend of CGI hauntings and live-action romance made the title a box-office powerhouse, grossing close to $291 million worldwide. Sawa’s brief but memorable scene—where a human-sized Casper finally steps onto the floor to dance with Christina Ricci’s Kat—etched his name into the pop-culture memory of a generation. For years, the actor described the cameo as a “professional burden,” insisting in his early twenties that he was “a thespian, not a ghost collector.” He actively avoided any mention of the film, fearing that the nostalgic label would eclipse his later, grittier work in movies like Idle Hands and Final Destination.
Time and a 30th-anniversary theatrical re-release forced a shift. Sawa now admits that the ghost of Casper is part of the foundation that launched his career, and that resisting it only prolonged his own discomfort. “There will always be Casper stuff… but I have to embrace it,” he said, noting that the phrase “Can I keep you?”—the line he delivered in the film’s climax—remains a cultural touchstone he can finally own.
Premonitions, plane safety and a log-truck phobia
While the ghostly role haunted his early fame, another supernatural experience cemented a bizarre personal mantra. In Final Destination Sawa’s character experiences a premonition that his school’s flight will explode, prompting him and several classmates to skip the trip—only to watch the plane burst in mid-air. Decades later, the actor jokes that the movie’s premise has become his own safety checklist: “The chances of me doing a movie about dying in an airplane and then actually dying in an airplane would be pretty slim. So I think I’m safe.” He adds that a real-life crash would be “too perfect” to happen, a sentiment he repeats whenever boarding a flight.
That same film also gifted Sawa a lingering visual trigger: the opening of Final Destination 2 with a logging-truck accident that triggers a massive pile-up. Whenever he drives behind a log-laden rig, the scene flashes in his mind, and he can’t help but picture the terrifying cascade of metal. He acknowledges the irony of living with a fear birthed by fiction, yet he also credits the sequence for making him hyper-aware of road safety, joking that “everybody likes to talk about the log truck.”
Coven Academy: a fresh magical playground with Gen Z
In 2024, Sawa joined the cast of Coven Academy a supernatural comedy-drama set in a New Orleans boarding school for budding witches. He plays Mr. Cole a laid-back warlock professor who guides teenage spell-casters through their studies. The series marks his first major foray into a Disney+ original, and it re-unites him with fellow ’90s alumni Tiffani Thiessen best known for “Saved by the Bell.” Their on-set chemistry is described as “comfortably surprising,” with both actors noting that their shared childhood fame makes the generational gap feel less daunting.
Working alongside a cast of Gen Z talent introduced Sawa to a new lexicon of slang and cultural cues. He confessed that attempts to drop contemporary slang often fell flat, prompting laughter from younger co-stars and the occasional crickets. “My 12-year-old son told me not to try the ‘6-7’ thing,” Sawa recalled, noting that the generational exchange became a two-way learning experience. Thiessen, who also has teenage children, said she routinely asks the younger actors for clarification on trends, treating the set as a mutual classroom.
Looking ahead, Sawa hopes the series will leave a lasting imprint similar to his earlier roles. “I think Coven Academy is going to be one of those shows that in twenty years people will say, ‘Oh, Mr. Cole,’” he mused, acknowledging that any iconic character—whether a ghost, a doomed teen, or a magical professor—tends to stick around in the public imagination.
