Amanda Seyfried is forever indebted to Mean Girls.
In an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Seyfried reflected on the 2004 teen comedy and the “unadulterated fun” she had while making the film when she was 17.
Host Josh Horowitz reminded Seyfried how loved the film is to this day. “Until the day you die, a 14-year-old girl will come up to you every day and quote you as if it just came out the day before.” Horowitz said.
“I hope they quote it on my grave,” said Seyfried, who played Karen Smith in the movie. “That’s an organic moment. It was, in many ways, a perfect movie, and people relate to it, still. It connected us, and it continues to. I will always be excited to talk about it,” adding “Any day, I’ll honor that movie for what it did for me as a person.”
The film, written by Tina Fey, also starred Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Jonathan Bennett, Lizzy Caplan and Fey. It followed Cady Heron (Lohan), a naïve teenager who transfers to an American high school after years of homeschooling in Africa. Cady becomes a hit with The Plastics, the A-list girl clique at her new school, until she makes the mistake of falling for Aaron Samuels, the ex-boyfriend of alpha Plastic Regina George (McAdams).
“I truly think the experience of making it has nothing to do with how well it did, for sure,” she told Horowitz. “I think the experience for me is very specific, because I’d never been in a movie before. I’d never been on a set like that before. And I was working with people who had. So, for me, it was just, everything was new.”
The 2004 film was followed up in 2011 with Mean Girls 2, with a new cast and different storyline. A Mean Girls musical feature, based on the 2018 Broadway musical, was released in 2024.
