While Making Mean Girls, Lindsay Lohan “Just Needed a Hug”
mean girls lindsay lohan excerpt books
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong David Canfield Hillary Busis Hadley Hall Meares Marie Brenner Jennifer Gould Anthony Breznican Joe Reid Nate Freeman Keziah Weir
In an excerpt from ‘So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We’re Still So Obsessed with It),’ author Jennifer Armstrong digs into Lohan’s yearning to play Regina George, how the Plastics got into character, and why some on set saw trouble ahead for the young star: “The poor kid—everybody wanted something from her.”
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Vanity Fair
Lindsay Lohan was all in on Mean Girls—if she could be Regina George. And though she and director Mark Waters thought this was a great idea, not everyone involved agreed.

At the time, Lohan was prone to miscalculating her fame and its implications. She hadn’t realized she couldn’t just go around playing any part she wanted. She was a brand now, and other people, powerful people, had strong opinions about the kinds of roles she should and shouldn’t play.

Mean Girls’ fate was riding on Lohan, given her Freaky Friday box office clout. “Lindsay brings this gigantic advantage in casting in that you automatically like her,” producer Lorne Michaels said. She had so far built her career on her image as likable, sweet, Disney-friendly. Playing the ultimate mean girl would test audiences’ affection for her—and could turn them off completely.

Writer Tina Fey liked the idea of Lohan as Regina. Lindsay, as Waters says, “bowled over everybody,” which was the energy they were looking for in Regina. But the other filmmakers began to wonder if Lohan should instead play the lead role of Cady, the good girl who goes mean and then back again. Paramount executives wanted their newly bankable star in the central, relatable role. Michaels similarly thought she could use that “aggressive” energy that Waters noted but also play on her engaging screen presence. She could be the good girl “who gets to turn into Regina,” as Fey later explained.

Waters became convinced of the wisdom of putting Lohan in the role of Cady. He tried arguing the point with Lohan. But she dug in her heels. She wanted to do something different after becoming so well-known as Anna Coleman, the punky-but-sweet heroine of Freaky Friday. She

had grown tired of, she said, playing the “damaged teenager.” She later explained, “I had just played—in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and Freaky Friday—not the cool girl in school. I was still seventeen years old and I wanted to be the cool girl on set.”

As the debate over Lohan’s role continued, the filmmakers momentarily resigned to Lohan’s will and began to consider many other young actresses for the role of Cady. Among them were Kristen Stewart (a standout as Jodie Foster’s daughter in the 2002 thriller Panic Room and soon to break through to superstardom in Twilight), Michelle Trachtenberg (little sister Dawn on Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and Mae Whitman (known already for a string of roles as a kid, including When a Man Loves a Woman and One Fine Day). Though they were all competent actresses, none of the team felt they had found their perfect Cady. Then came the final blow: Paramount head Sherry Lansing sat Waters down and gave him what he calls a “come to Jesus” speech.

Lansing felt lucky to be working with him and Lohan after the triumph of Freaky Friday. But she simply couldn’t imagine Lohan as Regina. Lohan’s audience, Lansing insisted, simply would not accept her as the bad girl.

Mark Waters began to see why Lansing insisted on Lohan playing Cady. He needed Cady to be subtle and complex. He also needed Cady to get the audience on her side and keep them there, even as she becomes the worst version of herself. The rare young actress who could convey a world of emotion with one flicker in her eyes or twitch of her face, Lohan also had the benefit of a growing fandom who would come into the theater loving her. These qualities weren’t easy to find in a teen actress, and Lohan had them all.

The campaign to persuade Lohan began. A plus to Cady: she had far more lines than Regina did. Another: she had a much comfier wardrobe, full of T-shirts, tennis shoes, and jeans (though this turned out not to be a selling point for Lohan, who coveted the sexy Plastics looks). Cady also underwent a transformation, from naïve new girl to scheming Queen Bee and back again.

These arguments, focused on her own strengths and daring her to take on a bigger acting challenge, did the trick. By August, Lohan entered negotiations to star as Cady Heron. The team persuaded her this would boost her burgeoning career as a promising young actress. A Jodie Foster, not an Annette Funicello.

The Plastics may have gotten the royal treatment at North Shore High, but the actresses who played them had to settle for a little less on the film’s Canadian set to honor its modest $17 million budget.

All of the Plastics except Rachel McAdams, a Toronto local, stayed in the same hotel along with the other Americans—Tina Fey and the adults, Lohan, Jonathan Bennett, Lizzy Caplan, and Daniel Franzese—and these were not luxury accommodations. The fire alarm would go off almost every night for some reason or another, never because there was an actual fire. But they had a good time anyway.

“We killed Toronto,” costar Amanda Seyfried said. “That Sutton Place was just a real shithole at the time. But that bar was great. We were way too young, having way too much fun.” Seyfried, there to make her first movie, looked to Lohan, the dominant one, the alpha, for cues. She later said Lohan was “in the middle of the whole thing” and “created a really fun vibe.”

For most of the Plastics, the experience was like a dream summer camp. They hung out in hotel rooms and trailers with Amy Poehler and Tim Meadows, dined with Fey. Meadows took the kids to a Chris Rock comedy show. Only after he had gotten the tickets and brought them all to the show did he think, Are they old enough to actually see this?

McAdams kept mostly to herself and went home at night, giving her a remove from the others that was Regina-like, though in her case it wasn’t because she was a snob. She was simply older than the other girls and a local with a life of her own. When she did stick around, she meshed more with the adults among the crew than with her costars because she was so much older than the mostly high school–age cast members. She’d often join when Waters took editor Wendy Greene Bricmont and others working behind the scenes on the film out for drinks at the end of a workweek, but rarely socialized with the teens.

What the production saved on hotel bills, it spent on costuming the Plastics, which was critical. Lohan, for instance, had a whopping 56 costume changes throughout the film—a lot for a standard movie, and on par with fashion-forward teen movies like The Princess Diaries (50 changes for Anne Hathaway’s character) and Clueless (60 for Alicia Silverstone). Hair would be big, too, literally and figuratively. As Lohan’s character transitioned from regular girl to Queen Bee, she asked for hair that looked like that of the ultimate hair icon at the time, Jennifer Aniston.

Lohan tried to take charge of her look in other ways, too. She obsessed over finding pink Ugg boots, the height of trendiness at the time. She had to wear a pink pleated skirt in the wonderfully slapstick scene when she falls into a garbage can upside down, her legs exposed and kicking, and she was certain she needed pink Uggs to complete the look. She scoured the internet for them, but Uggs were still too cutting-edge to find there. She had also begun applying Swarovski crystals to her cell phone. The role was infecting her real life: “It was somewhat Method,” she said later, laughing at the memory.

Lohan couldn’t wait to get out of the baggy shirts and jeans of the early scenes and “get into the foxy Juicy Couture,” according to Fey. She would constantly rush to wear pieces meant for later in the timeline or vamp up her hair when it was still supposed to be straighter and simpler. The wardrobe, hair, and makeup people had to keep pulling her back.

Once, they shot half a scene with her hair straight, as planned. They broke for lunch. Lohan snuck off and curled her hair. When they resumed shooting, Waters was pulling his own hair out, though he maintained his usual calm. “Lindsay, what are you doing?” he asked. “We can’t shoot the scene with your hair curled. We already shot half without it.” She started crying, then returned to the makeup trailer. Word came back from hair and makeup: “Well, we need an hour now, because you made her cry.” All Waters could do was laugh. This teenage girl just wanted to look pretty. He understood that impulse, and he knew Lohan’s strong personality all too well. It was what made her so compelling onscreen. “She is watchable,” he says, “but she’s also a handful. The movie wouldn’t be successful without that energy.”

In Mean Girls, you could consider any of the main female characters to be the movie’s villain or hero, depending on your perspective. But the de facto villain is Regina George, and McAdams leaned into the darkness skillfully.

McAdams herself, on the other hand, charmed everyone who got to know her, even though she didn’t socialize much during her downtime with her peers. “Rachel was a dear,” says Jo Chim, who played the disdainful saleswoman at the mall boutique 1–3–5, echoing many cast and crew members’ sentiments. “She was the sweetest.” Jan Caruana, who played student Emma Gerber, remembers all too well how bad it felt to have to bump into McAdams (as Regina) in the cafeteria and snipe, “Watch where you’re going, fat-ass!”

At first, McAdams’s kindness was a bit of an impediment. At times, she struggled to get into and stay in character as Regina. Waters had an idea: what if they added back all of Regina’s F-bombs that had been removed from the original script?

She would say her Regina lines full of fucks, without the cameras rolling: “Are you fucking kidding me? You think you’re fucking pretty?”Then the cameras rolled, and she did it clean: “So you agree? You think you’re really pretty?”

This time, it had “the teeth it needed,” Waters says. “It’s like she needed to be vulgar to get into it.”

Waters also had her model Regina on Alec Baldwin’s character in the David Mamet drama Glengarry Glen Ross: “Put that coffee down! Coffee’s for closers only. You think I’m fucking with you? I am not fucking with you.”

Lacey Chabert as Gretchen Wieners is the movie’s secret weapon, giving the tour de force comedic performance of a high-strung girl’s unraveling that drives the plot. She brought a charmed innocence to everything she did, both onscreen and off. Chabert turned twenty-one during the shoot, on the day they were filming in Sherway Gardens mall. The crew made her a cake, and the entire mall sang “Happy Birthday” to her. She prepared a Canadian Thanksgiving feast in October for the cast and crew, teaching Seyfried how to make a pecan pie along the way. The two girls grew close quickly.

Chabert “is such an old soul,” says Carol Hartwick, who was in charge of Chabert’s and Seyfried’s hair for the duration of the shoot. Other cast members echo her love for Chabert: “the sweetest person,” they say, “super nice.”

Seyfried took refuge in her on-set friendship with Chabert. She had just graduated from high school and was terrified. Chabert, as a Hollywood veteran, took her in, inviting her to her trailer to listen to Dido and hang out.

Seyfried had to play a classic dumb blond, but the role brought a necessary balance to the Plastics. The way Seyfried played Karen Smith, she could come across as dumb, and she and others label her that way. But she also could be seen as oblivious to the drama. She works as a perfect foil for Gretchen—someone who seems to have gotten a seat at the Plastics’ table without trying, and without really caring. She mirrors Regina a bit, but not as carefully as Gretchen does. She is more creative because she isn’t as worried.

Lohan, meanwhile, was very much in her “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” phase on the set of Mean Girls. Her talent could cause the adults around her to forget that she was a kid—until she acted like one. “She’s not a weird robot child actor,” Fey said after observing her on set. “While they were adjusting the lights, Lindsay could be on her cell phone talking to her mom and chewing gum. Then as soon as ‘Action!’ was called, she was completely in the scene. Only a kid can do that.”

Lohan brought a depth to the role she hadn’t quite tapped in her previous work, and that was due to her increasing maturity. When Waters told her that he wanted her to stretch, she shrugged and simply did it. “She was very skilled in the sense that, if you asked her to do something specific, she could just nail it,” Waters recalls. “I mean, she was just immediately able to translate anything you said. It’d be like: Boom, here it is! Like a gymnast.”

As the clear, solo star of the film, Lohan became the center of attention. But she was still finding her way as a celebrity while juggling her continued high school studies.Though she later became known as difficult to work with, and some of the Mean Girls cast and crew report minor challenges (like the hair debacle), Lohan also had staunch admirers on the set. She was paid a reported $1 million to star in Mean Girls, and Fey felt she was worth it.

Hairstylist Carol Hartwick had an especially good relationship with the star. She thought Lohan was “an absolute sweetheart who needed strong parenting, somebody to lean on and support her.”

As a minor, Lohan had to be accompanied by a guardian at all times. She had a friend working as her assistant, and the friend was just old enough to serve as her official guardian. But Lohan had a parent with her on the set perhaps just once, according to several of the cast and crew. Some don’t remember seeing her parents, Michael and Dina, at all. She was largely forced to stand up for herself when, for instance, the production day threatened to spill beyond the legally allowed limit for child actors (eight hours per day in both Canada and New Jersey). The guardian wasn’t much help in these cases.

Rajiv Surendra, who played Kevin G. and befriended Lohan, recalls Lohan speaking up when the production was threatening to stretch late. “It could have come across as being difficult,” he says. “But I know now she wasn’t being difficult; she knew what the industry was demanding of her and she also knew what her rights were. She knew what she needed to do to be able to maintain a standard she had set for herself. And part of that was saying no.”

Waters remembers it a bit differently. “We would wrap her early and then we’d see her out at clubs that night,” he says with a laugh. “We’d say, ‘Ah, crap.’ She was still only seventeen, but she’d definitely matured into her own woman by then.”

Either way, her self-possession impressed Surendra, given the circumstances. “When I was finished with work, someone would drive me home to my parents, where my mom cooked dinner and I would go to bed in my own bedroom,” he says. “She didn’t have that.”

Hartwick also empathized with Lohan, who carried a heavy load as a rising star. “Seventeen and making millions,” she says. “The poor kid—everybody wanted something from her. I will stand up and fight for her, all day long. She just needed a hug.”

Excerpted from the book SO FETCH: The Making of MEAN GIRLS (And Why We’re Still So Obsessed with It). Copyright © 2024 by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. From Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.