See Britney Spears' Teary-Eyed Audition for 'The Notebook'

Britney Spears nearly starred opposite Ryan Gosling in The Notebook, and now fans of the 2004 romance film can get a glimpse of how she would have done in the role. After the pop star revealed she made it to the final round of auditions to play Allie, a role that ultimately went to Rachel McAdams, in her new memoir The Woman in Me, her 2002 casting tape was obtained by The Daily Mail.

In the emotional audition video, Spears is brought almost to tears as she tells Gosling, who is off-camera, that she will be marrying another man. "I'm not staying," Spears says, acting as Allie. "I tried to call you to tell you that I wasn't going to stay – but nobody answered the phone... Noah, you can't marry two people. And I'm marrying Lon, so I should go, okay?"

The "Everytime" singer, who had previously only ever acted in Crossroads, then has her eyes well up with tears as she tells Gosling, "I prayed for you to die in the war, really. Well, not die. I would have felt completely horrible if you would die. But I kinda didn't want you to be alive anymore because I couldn't bear the thought of you being with somebody else, or of us never seeing each other again. So I gotta go, okay?"

Casting director Matthew Barry told The Daily Mail that "Britney wasn't just good" during her reading with Gosling, "she was phenomenal." Barry continued, "It was a tough decision. Britney blew us all away. Our jaws were on the floor. I was blown away. Absolutely blown away. She brought her A-game that day." He continued, "Britney beat out several of the top female actresses at the time. Scarlett Johansson, Claire Danes, Kate Bosworth, Amy Adams, Jamie King and Mandy Moore auditioned for this role. Britney beat out all of them. Everybody who was anybody that year wanted this part."

In The Woman in Me, Spears writes that she wasn't upset about losing the role to McAdams. "Even though it would have been fun to reconnect with Ryan Gosling after our time on the Mickey Mouse Club, I'm glad I didn't do it," she writes. "If I had, instead of working on my album In the Zone I'd have been acting like a 1940s heiress day and night."

Spears continued that she struggled acting in Crossroads due to "what acting did to my mind." She explained, "I think I started Method acting – only I didn't know how to break out of my character. I really became this other person. ... I was someone else for months while I filmed Crossroads. Still to this day, I bet the girls I shot that movie with think, She's a little... quirky. If they thought that, they were right."