Randy Meeks, played by Jamie Kennedy, is a character in the films Scream and Scream 2, with a brief appearance in Scream 3.
Randy Meeks is a Woodsboro teenager. He is a friend of Sidney Prescott, for whom he has romantic feelings, and is an avid fan of horror movies. He uses his knowledge of horror film plots and clichés to define the series of murders that occur in Scream, Scream 2 and Scream 3. In Scream, he is shot by Billy Loomis but survives.
In Scream 2, he attends the fictional Windsor College with Sidney, studying film. When a new series of murders begins, Randy taunts the killer over the phone, mocking Billy Loomis' in the previous film. During this call, the killer dragged him into a van and killed him. It is later revealed that Mrs. Loomis, Billy's mother, killed Randy out of anger at his insults to her son.
Randy appears posthumously in Scream 3 in a recorded video, in which he explains to Sidney the "rules" concerning the latest killer.
In the published screenplay for Scream, an alternate ending had Randy (rather than Sidney) kill Stu Macher before asking Sidney out on a date. Before a script leak forced the rewriting of parts of the Scream 2 screenplay, Randy was to be Gale Weathers' cameraman rather than a student as shown in the finished film. His death, however, remained the same. Wes Craven and Ehren Kruger considered bringing Randy back in Scream 3, revealing him to have survived his attack in Scream 2 but abandoned the idea as too unrealistic.
Casting for Randy was contested between Kennedy and Breckin Meyer. The production team favored Kennedy, as they believed he had certain qualities that made him more suitable than Meyer for the role. Kennedy, however, had had no major roles prior to Scream, and Dimension Films, the studio producing the films, was eager to have a more prominent actor in the production alongside the other well-known stars such as Drew Barrymore and Courtney Cox. The production team itself, however, was adamant that Kennedy was the best choice and fought successfully to keep him in.