Making Fetch Happen

A chat with author Jennifer Keishin Armstrong about "Mean Girls."

The founding Plastics: Lacey Chabert, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried. (Source.)

Twenty years on, Mean Girls remains as vital as ever. Not a day goes by where I don’t see the classic teen comedy referenced online, and whenever the internet serves up unsolicited images of Kris Jenner with her Kardashlings, I always hear Amy Poehler bragging “I’m not like a regular mom, I’m a cool mom.”

Mean Girls is big business. A buzzy, TikTok-fueled reboot hit theaters over the weekend and claimed the No. 1 spot at the box office; it showcases Angourie Rice in the Cady Heron role and Reneé Rapp assuming Regina George’s Queen Bee throne. The original film, a glimpse inside the wicked mind of screenwriter Tina Fey, starred a baby Lindsay Lohan as a high school student who befriends Regina (a vicious Rachel McAdams) and plots to overthrow her — and put a stop to her reign of terror. Ironically, in executing her mission, Cady sinks to the level of her nemesis. Lessons are learned! And jokes are made. Fey packed her script with spiky one-liners that are now firmly part of the cultural lexicon. For example: “On Wednesdays we wear pink.” “She doesn’t even go here!” And “That is so fetch,” fetch being a word that Regina’s handmaiden Gretchen Wieners (a high-strung Lacey Chabert) is trying to make happen.

In her new book, So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We’re Still So Obsessed With It), the brilliant pop analyst Jennifer Keishin Armstrong whisks us back to 2004, when Lohan was an It Girl and bootcut 7 For All Mankind jeans were all the rage. I called her to talk about the movie and its enduring appeal.

I was surprised to read in your book that Lindsay wanted to play Regina rather than Cady, the leading role.

The director, Mark Waters, wanted her for [Regina], too. He had just worked with her on Freaky Friday, and so he went to her and was like, I think you should be in this movie. And she said, I want to play Regina. And he was OK with that. But then Freaky Friday came out and she became really famous and successful, and you would think this means she gets to do whatever she wants, but it really doesn't. Success can often hamper you just as much as it helps you. And now everybody had an opinion about what she should be doing — everybody being the movie executives. And so the studio was like, She can't be the villain. I'm sorry. Her whole deal now is that she's the likable girl who everybody relates to. She needs to be the main girl and she needs to be in the center on the posters. No one else was famous. You need to remember that in this movie. She was the famous one, so they said, She has to do this.

For once, the studio was right!

She is so, so good. And watching this and some of her other older movies for this book, it just really struck me how talented she is. And at that age especially, that was shocking.

She was 17 at the time. Meanwhile, Rachel McAdams was 25 years old and relatively unknown. She had yet to appear in The Notebook and The Family Stone. I would argue that Regina is her career-defining performance. And yet, her first audition did not go well.

Mark Waters said to her, You are not going to get this part. You are too old, but you are amazing, and I hope to God we work together sometime because you're going to be a star. And she was like, I get it. I just thought I'd try. Goodnight and good luck.

I love when they had the idea to bring her back in for Regina. They had her read with Lindsay. [Waters] said the reason he loved [seeing them together] was because Rachel was 25 and Lindsay was the correct age. He said he rarely saw anyone intimidate Lindsay — I think that included adults. Lindsay was a force and that's her whole deal. But when Rachel came in and she was so cool and she was 25, he said he saw the energy in the room change and that Lindsay was a little intimidated. He thought, That’s what we need. And it kind of makes sense that you have a 25-year-old play Regina. There was always that one girl in your school who seemed like she was like 30.

Let’s discuss Lacey Chabert. She wasn’t a household name but had been in the acting game a while — I knew her from the primetime soap Party of Five. In my opinion, she deserved an Oscar for playing Gretchen Wieners, daughter of the inventor of Toaster Strudels.

She is so critical. She has to have that nervous breakdown. She has to give that Caesar speech, which is a tour de force. Gretchen Wieners has to crack. That's the whole crux of this thing. [It’s] her tightly wound energy through the whole thing and trying to make fetch happen, and she's just trying so hard. And you’re just like, Oh God, I want her to succeed. And Lacey Chabert is so good, you forget she's even acting. They had a really hard time finding this character, finding somebody to play her. And they said when she came in [to audition], it was suddenly like, Oh, now we get it. It's just one of those things where before, they were like, We don't know what we're looking for, but we haven't found it. And then the minute she did it, they said, There she is.

Tina Fey’s origin story is so compelling. She had not been a member of the in-crowd in her high school, but she did have an attitude — a mean streak, if you will. What drew her to option the Rosalind Wiseman book and reframe a straightforward study of schoolgirls’ fraught social dynamics as an edgy comedy?

I really admire [Fey’s] honesty about [her high-school persona]. She says she was essentially a different kind of mean girl — a sort of defensive mean girl. She kind of figured out early that she wasn't going to be the Regina George. She didn't look like a Barbie doll. She didn't have any of those things. She wasn't this huge charismatic force, but what she knew is that she was funny. So, she just figured out that she could say very funny, pretty mean things about other people almost as a defense. Well, I'm going to be mean first. That’s kind of how I'm going to deal with feeling like I am not one of the beautiful people. She always said that there were certain people in your high school who seemed famous. That's the Regina George within your high school. There were the famous ones, and she didn't feel like she was one of those people. So, her response was to be this snarky outsider, and she was with the drama kids kind of just making fun of everything. Well, I don't even care that I'm not part of those other people. I don't care that I'm not being invited to their parties. I think in the grand scheme of things — and a couple of people even mentioned this to me who knew her — that she was kind of a Janis Ian. [Entertainment journalist] Damian Holbrook was the basis for [Janis’ best friend] Damian Leigh in the movie and was Tina’s friend in high school. He saw himself in Damian. His pairing with Janis reminded Damian of him and Tina hanging out and making fun of everything and making pop-culture references.

Lizzy Caplan and Daniel Franzese as misfit teens Janis and Damian, who recruit Cady as a secret agent in their plot to destroy Regina’s reputation.

Today, the Janises and Damians of the world make references to Mean Girls. How did this clever, gleefully girly movie become such a huge obsession, especially online?

Tina Fey’s ability to write a one-liner is critical to this. And the way it merged with the timing of meme culture — it just was there at the beginning. It was right at the time we were starting to make memes on the internet.

It has to do with timing. It has to do with coming out in 2004, catching on with millennials who were the builders of memes essentially. And there used to be jobs where you just made memes. And so that really is a huge part because it can stay in our lives that way. As a side note, as an example of this, [for book research] I watched the movie with some middle schoolers because I wanted to see what is still resonating with people. And one of the girls kept reciting the lines with it. And then when we got to [the scene where Regina gets hit by a bus], she freaked out.

WHAT. She didn’t know about that scene? But she’d memorized entire chunks of dialogue?

She said [she learned the lines] from TikTok. So that tells you that the lines live on regardless of whether people have seen the movie.

The other thing, though, is there’s a real continuing emotional resonance — I mean, it’s too bad in a way. It's too bad that we still relate so much to this, that kids continue to relate to what they see in terms of bullying. And it's possible that this is just the human condition. And so, we're always going to relate. And the way that you can use Mean Girls as shorthand to explain behaviors — not just of children. It has come up so many times recently in politics. People will say, Oh my God, Donald Trump is such a mean girl. Or it's a “mean-girl situation.”

Do you have a favorite line?

Mine really actually is “I’ve got a heavy flow and a wide-set vagina.” There's something about these lines, too, if you look at a lot of them. [Fey] has a really musical ear for comedy, which most really great comedy writers do. Listen to the ways that all of these are phrased. It's not just that they're funny and good, it's that there is a musicality to them. And that was a good one. And then [actress Stefanie Drummond’s] delivery is just legendary.

And they had to fight for that line. The ratings board wanted them to cut it to get their PG-13, and they fought for it and won, which, to me, is a little tiny feminist victory, too. They were like, This is not graphic sex. This is a girl talking about real biology. That's all it is. She's talking about tampons and vaginas.

Scandalous. That kinda sorta reminds me of the subversive way that Greta Gerwig ended Barbie — by having Margot Robbie go to the gynecologist. What else makes Mean Girls feminist?

It allowed girls to be messy and flawed and not perfect. And if you look at a lot of teen movies before that, that wasn't really true. It gave us empathy. Even for the Regina Georges of the world, it does kind of have an empathetic view of her in the end; even though she's also a monster, it shows that it's not easy to be her. She has a downfall and learns a lesson, too. It really does show that the world could be better if girls — and all of us, it’s not just girls — worked together and let each other be. This incredibly funny, quotable movie that was aimed at young women and took their problems seriously should not be underestimated.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You can follow Jennifer Keishin Armstrong on Instagram, check out her newsletter and get her new book So Fetch here.