Academy Award nominee Amanda Seyfried has signed on for the leading role in the upcoming series adaptation of Skinny Dip, based on Carl Hiaasen’s 2004 caper novel. Before Amazon MGM Studios acquired the project, it was originally set up at HBO Max earlier this year.
What do we know about Amanda Seyfried’s Skinny Dip show?
According to Deadline, Seyfried will be playing the role of Joey Perrone, a woman who is pushed off a cruise liner by her cheating husband. She managed to survive the fall, giving her a chance to plot revenge with a former cop. It is being written and executive-produced by Once Upon A Time creators Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis.
“Perrone’s second anniversary didn’t go quite as planned. She expected earrings, but instead, her husband Chaz had alternate plans,” reads the show’s logline. “After unexpectedly finding herself on the other side of those plans, she vows to get revenge. Teaming up with a disgraced ex-cop, Joey sets out to make Chaz pay.”
In addition to leading the cast, Seyfried is also serving as an executive producer along with Bill Lawrence for Doozer, Hiaasen, Jeff Ingold, and Liza Katzer. The Prime Video adaptation is a production by Warner Bros. Television.
Seyfriend’s most recent TV project was the Peacock miniseries Long Bright River, which debuted last March. She will next be seen in the psychological thriller The Housemaid with Sydney Sweeney and in the musical drama The Testament of Ann Lee with Lewis Pullman. The latter recently earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy.
Amanda Seyfried and Meryl Streep’s romantic musical is set to arrive on Prime Video. The first part of Mamma Mia! came out on September 12, 2008, whereas a sequel dropped a decade later in July 2018. Apart from Seyfried and Streep, the movie featured talents like Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, and many more.
Mamma Mia! with Amanda Seyfried to release on Prime Video soon
The fan-favorite musical rom-com, Mamma Mia!, featuring Amanda Seyfried and Meryl Streep, is releasing on the streaming platform, Prime Video, on November 15, 2025.
Helmed by Phyllida Lloyd, the movie focuses on Streep’s character Donna, a single mother who works as a hotelier and is busy with the preparations for her daughter’s wedding. On the other hand, her daughter Sophie, played by Seyfried, is working on a plan to meet her biological father.
Mamma Mia! went on to become a big success at the box office and made over $600 million against a budget of reportedly $52 million. While the movie won the hearts of fans across the globe, critics had a mixed response to it.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the 2008 film earned a score of 55 percent on the Tomatometer and 66 percent on Popcornmeter. Its much-awaited sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, released a decade later, but had a toned-down response compared to the first one. It made around $395 million at the box office.
Recently, Amanda Seyfried spoke at the Toronto International Film Festival and stated that the third part is reportedly in the works. She said, “It is, yes. I think. We all said, ‘Yeah, definitely.’ It’s our way of marketing and getting support. Big movies like that are all about studio timing.”
The Jennifer’s Body actress also explained how she went on to work on Mamma Mia! 2 instead of Wicked in 2018. Seyfried said, “I remember they did Mamma Mia! 2 instead of Wicked. They could only do one big movie at that time, so we ended up slotting into that. So, it’s about silly things like that.”
Ann Lee, whose father was a blacksmith by day and a tailor by night, grew up poor and illiterate in Manchester, England. She immigrated to New York in 1774, bringing along just six followers—including her loyal brother, William (played by Lewis Pullman), and lowly husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott). By the time of her death a decade later, she’d created one of the largest utopian societies in American history. The group was collectively convinced she’d emerged as the female incarnation of Christ. Fastvold concedes that the Shaker experiment had its faults—“celibacy is a complicated solution,” she says—but found great inspiration in Lee’s vision.
“She took this horrible trauma and turned that suffering into compassion, into community, into how she could mother the world,” Fastvold says. “It’s all about worship through labor, creating something of beauty and of meaning and giving everything you have to it. As someone who wishes to try and create impossible things, that really spoke to me.”
A veteran of big-screen musicals including Les Misérables and Mamma Mia!, Seyfried has been friendly with both Fastvold and Corbet (who also produced Ann Lee) for years. “When you trust somebody as much as I trust Mona, you can’t help but go into the light,” she says. “But I just didn’t believe that I could embody someone who led this type of charge, in this time period.” Seyfried had already taken on a very different kind of cult-adjacent leader in The Dropout, winning an Emmy for her portrayal of scammer entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes—but Ann Lee’s demands were especially daunting. “This felt further from me than anything that I can remember.”
Seyfried worried most about pulling off Ann’s 18th-century Manchester accent, which she devised—effectively, made up—alongside Fastvold and a dialect coach. “The ecstatic dancing and thumping and pounding, the frenzy that the Shakers lived in—I love that. It makes me feel alive,” Seyfried says. “That’s not the thing that intimidates me.” About five months before filming, she started recording songs at Fastvold and Corbet’s apartment with composer Daniel Blumberg (who won an Oscar for The Brutalist and made his feature-film debut on The World to Come). “I was amazed by how she was singing, dancing, getting water thrown over her face,” Blumberg says of Seyfried. “It was such an extreme job.”
Blumberg developed what Fastvold calls a “radical score” based on mostly existing Shaker hymns before composing an original song that plays as the end credits roll. The pair introduced the cast to improvisational singing via vocalists like Shelley Hirsch and Maggie Nicols, honing Ann Lee’s soundscape to feel as primal as possible.
“It’s prayer—it’s not entertainment. So it was important to find strong intent in the way you were using your voice, in the way you were moving your body,” Fastvold says. “It was definitely the most experimental project that I’ve ever worked on,” Blumberg agrees. He was constantly adding and subtracting, finessing tones and rhythms. One day while in New York, Blumberg walked by a music shop and came across a “little bell” from the 1700s. “Suddenly, the bell was all over the film,” he says.
The sound mix we hear in the final film uses those pre-shoot recordings, live singing from Seyfried et al. on set, and studio sessions that took place mere months ago. Seyfried kept reaching deeper and deeper into Ann’s internal life, with Hirsch and Nicols’s exercises encouraging her to run wild. “So much of it was screaming and doing weird takes. I had these crazy moments of complete freedom—the weirder, the better,” Seyfried says. “I was, like, ‘So, basically, we can do whatever the fuck we want.’ But it’s got to come from somewhere—it’s got to be grounded in something. You could ruin your fucking voice, I’ll tell you that.”
The Emmy-winning actress spoke with ABC News’ Will Ganss, during which he asked her about a possible third film in the franchise. While she noted that “everybody says it’s gonna happen,” she hasn’t seen a script yet.
The reporter then brought up that Carpenter has been singing “Mamma Mia” at some of the stops on her Short ‘N Sweet tour, including at Madison Square Garden over the weekend, during the surprise cover part of her setlist.
“Because we know age is sort of a forgettable construct in the MMCU, the Mamma Mia Cinematic Universe. So people are saying, could Sabrina play Sophie’s daughter?” Ganss told Seyfriend, to which she replied seemingly uncertainly, “It’s… Eh… It’s… Technically she could.”
When he pointed out that Cher’s character and Meryl Streep’s played mother-daughter in Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, despite only being three years apart, Seyfried was convinced.
“You’re right, actually, [it] doesn’t matter,” The Dropout star said. “You know what? Old age makeup for me. That’s what it will be. … I’m an actor. I’ll do it. If Sabrina Carpenter wants to play my daughter, I’ll make it happen. It’s fine. She’s… I’m a big fan.”
While Seyfried hasn’t seen the script, Christine Baranski, for her part, at least has an idea for what it will be about.
“I was in London with [producer] Judy Craymer at our favorite watering hole, she is planning Mamma Mia 3. She gave me the narrative plotline of how it’s going to happen,” The Gilded Age star previously told The Hollywood Reporter. “That’s all I can say! But, it’s not like, ‘Oh, I wish it could happen!’ Judy Craymer makes things happen. She made number two happen, and it was a phenomenal hit. I wouldn’t put it past Judy Craymer to get everybody back together.”
In Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again — spoiler alert! — it was revealed that Streep’s Donna had died, but that doesn’t mean the Oscar-winning legend wouldn’t return to Greece or Croatia or wherever the possible third installment is set. The Only Murders in the Building actress told Vogueshe would “totally” return as a reincarnated Donna.
For her part, Carpenter just launched her Short ‘N Sweet tour in support of her second album of the same name and was just named to Time 100 Next’s list for 2024.
In her Time cover story tied to the list, the “Taste” singer opened up about waiting her whole life to achieve the level of fame she’s gotten to this year with her not one but two songs of the summer — “Espresso” and “Please Please Please.”
She also got candid about how incorporating her sexuality into her work has led to her receiving some of the vilification that Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera faced at the height of their fame, despite how they, Rihanna and Madonna have all helped make progress in that respect. However, it has only gone so far.
“You’ll still get the occasional mother that has a strong opinion on how you should be dressing,” Carpenter told Time. “And to that I just say, don’t come to the show, and that’s OK.”
She continued, “It’s unfortunate that it’s ever been something to criticize, because truthfully, the scariest thing in the world is getting up on a stage in front of that many people and having to perform as if it’s nothing. If the one thing that helps you do that is the way you feel comfortable dressing, then that’s what you’ve got to do.”
In some ways, September feels more like a reset than January. After the hedonism of Summer, snapping back into routine feels welcome and motivating. And some part of my brain was trained by the rigors of back-to-school season to associate September with new starts.
From moodboarding to buying new planners, I feel so productive in the fall. Many of us get this renewed burst of confidence and inspiration, even as we mourn the end of summer — and our beloved summer Fridays). It will always be back-to-school season, even if the closest you’ve been to a classroom in years is binge-watching Abbott Elementary.
The nostalgia trip we all take — pining for the days when our biggest worry was whether we’d make it to homeroom before the bell — is enough to make me yearn for high school. I don’t miss the classes or the people, but I do miss that time when the only thing I had to pay for was school lunch — and I didn’t even have to use my own money. Things were simpler, even if they weren’t better. But on TV and in movies, you can indulge in reminiscing and go on pretending that everything was better when you were in school.
What better way to indulge in that nostalgia than with a solid back-to-school watchlist?
These school-inspired shows and films aren’t merely entertainment — they’re time machines, transporting us back to that era of questionable fashion choices, awkward first crushes, and the unshakeable belief that high school was going to be the best four years of our lives. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. Our high school crushes did NOT look like Zac Efron in High School Musical.)
From the hallowed halls of Gilmore Girls’ private school or Hawkins Middle School’s air of murder in Stranger Things, these stories capture student life in all its glory and angst — no matter how unrelatable the actual scenarios are. They remind us of the friends we made, the lessons we learned (occasionally in class, but mostly outside of it), and the unshakeable certainty that our lives were about to change forever.
Without further ado, here’s our definitive back-to-school watchlist, guaranteed to give you all the feels and maybe — just maybe — make you wish you could do it all over again. But only if you get to look like a 25-year-old playing a teenager, because let’s face it, that’s half the fun of these shows.
1. Gilmore Girls
I used to wish I lived in Stars Hollow — the town where everyone knows your name, your coffee order, and your SAT scores. Gilmore Girls has become synonymous with fall and with the back-to-school season for a reason. We all wish we could channel Rory: her good grades, her pick of hot guys, and her superficial drama. So of course this show is ideal for when you’re feeling nostalgic for a high school experience that you never actually had. At its heart, this show is about the relationship between Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, a mother-daughter duo, so close you’ll give your mom a call. Rory’s journey through the hallowed halls of Chilton Preparatory School and later Yale University makes this show a back-to-school essential. Watching her navigate the cutthroat world of an elite private school — complete with Paris Geller, the human embodiment of a Type A girlboss — is both hilarious and oddly comforting.
2. Matilda
If Matilda doesn’t inspire you to want to telekinetically hurl your principal out a window, you never went to middle school. But more than wishing harm on Miss Trunchbull, This Roald Dahl adaptation makes me wish I had a teacher like Miss Honey. I had a few English teachers that came close (it’s always the English teachers) but corporate ladders of the adult world is devoid of soul that pure. Matilda Wormwood is every bookworm’s hero, a pint-sized genius who finally gets the recognition she deserves. We’re all waiting for our powers to kick in once we read enough books, I’m sure.
3. Jennifer’s Body
This film is Megan Fox at her peak — no wonder it’s recently been referenced by stars like Madison Beer. A Tumblr mainstay, Jennifer’s Body is a cult classic that went unappreciated in its time but it goes triple platinum in my apartment each back-to-school season. It asks the important question: what do you do when the scariest thing about high school isn’t the pop quiz in third period, but your best friend’s sudden appetite for human flesh? This bisexual-coded film is the Black Swan of high school dramas. Megan Fox stars as Jennifer, the quintessential high school hottie who starts killing — and eating — boys. If I was her bestie, I would let her. The gore and the gloriously cheesy one-liners — “You’re killing people!” “No, I’m killing boys.” — make this a brilliant feminist revenge fantasy. No wonder I crave it every year.
4. Bottoms
When it comes to gory, kitschy modern classics, Bottoms is a new entry and it’s number one with a bullet.
Bottoms is a queer high school comedy that reveals what happens when you mix Fight Club with sapphic energy and sprinkle in some Gen Z absurdism. Starring Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott, it follows two unpopular lesbian students who start a fight club to hook up with cheerleaders. It’s gloriously unhinged, unapologetically gay, and so killingly awkward in the best possible way.
Bottoms changed my brain chemistry, just like high school. It aptly captures the desperation of trying to fit in while also flipping off the entire concept of fitting in. Wrapped up in a packaging of violence, dark humor, and surprisingly tender moments, it’s a love letter to every queer kid who felt like an outsider. This film is the chaotic good energy we need in our back-to-school watchlist, reminding us that sometimes the best way to navigate the hellscape of high school is to create your own ridiculous rules.
5. The Breakfast Club
Speaking of creating your own rules and changing high school archetypes, The Breakfast Club is the OG film celebrating high school angst. The Breakfast Club is a John Hughes classic that never goes out of style. Five stereotypes walk into detention, and by the end, they’re dancing on tables and oversharing like they’re on their third glass of rosé. It’s a terrific reminder that high school was actually terrible, and we’re all just damaged goods trying to fit in.
As someone who was a floater in high school, this is pretty much what my average afternoon looked like. But without the cool 80s outfits. The film’s exploration of clique dynamics and the pressure to conform is still painfully relevant — even outside the halls of high school. Whether you identify with the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess, or the criminal (let’s be real, you’re probably a mix of all five by now), there’s something here for everyone. Plus, watching Judd Nelson’s John Bender stick it to the man will make you feel better about that passive-aggressive email you sent to HR last week. It’ll have you fist-pumping and cringing in equal measure – just like your actual high school experience.
6. Young Royals
One thing about me, I’m gonna bring up Young Royals. I thought my boarding school was full of angst and drama? It was nothing compared to Wilhelm and Simon’s experience at Hillerska, the Swedish boarding school for the elite in Young Royals. It’s gay Gossip Girl meets gay The Crown with a hefty dose of Swedish angst. Imagine if Prince Harry’s memoir was gay and he wrote it while listening to Robyn on repeat.
Young Royals follows a fictionalized Swedish Prince who is the “spare.” He grapples with royal responsibilities at a new school where he balances dealing with family expectations, class differences, and his growing feelings for a non-royal — and decidedly male — classmate. Tea. It’s a delicious cocktail of privilege, repression, and teen hormones that’ll make you grateful for your mundane high school experiences. But it also reminds you how much can change in September. Who knows, you might fall in love tomorrow. We can dream. The show’s final season aired this summer and it has one of the best finales I’ve ever seen. Go forth. Break your own heart.
7. Heartstopper
For a less angsty and more fluff-filled queer romance, turn on my personal comfort show: Heartstopper. It’s the wholesome gay content we didn’t know we needed in our cynical lives. Based on Alice Oseman’s graphic novels, this British coming-of-age story follows Charlie and Nick as they navigate friendship, love, and self-discovery. Its cast has grown iconic with the show’s immense popularity, making us root for Kit Conner and Joe Locke’s endeavors in real life as much as we root for Nick and Charlie on screen.
It’s so sweet but somehow manages to avoid being saccharine. It’s a refreshingly optimistic take on LGBTQ+ youth experiences that’ll make you want to go back in time and give your teenage self a hug. The show tackles issues like coming out, bullying, and mental health with a deft touch, all while serving up enough adorable moments alongside cringe-worthy universal experiences — like the age old “am I gay” quiz.
8. Sex Education
Less wholesome, but equally as iconic, Sex Education is a British gem about the awkwardness of puberty. It’s set in a high school that seems to exist in a timeless bubble of ’80s aesthetics and modern sensibilities. The show follows Otis — the son of a sex therapist — as he and his friends navigate the treacherous waters of teen sexuality. It’s frank, it’s funny, and it’ll make you wish you had access to this information when you were fumbling through your own sexual awakening. Apt for back-to-school season, it reminds us that no matter how old we get, when it comes to sex and relationships we’re all still awkward teenagers.
9. Election
Election is another cult classic starring a young Reese Witherspoon. This razor-sharp satire takes on the cutthroat world of high school politics and turns it into a mirrored funhouse mirror that reflects our current political landscape. Way more lighthearted than stress-watching the debate, I promise. Reese Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick is the overachiever we all love to hate — or secretly admire, depending on how many color-coded planners you own.
She’s gunning for student body president with the intensity she brought back in Legally Blonde. All while Matthew Broderick’s Mr. McAllister tries to sabotage her campaign in a misguided attempt to teach her a lesson (spoiler alert: it doesn’t go well). Election is a delicious back-to-school watch for when you’re feeling disillusioned with the system but still harboring a secret desire to change it from within. It’s a biting commentary on ambition, ethics, and the dangers of unchecked power — all wrapped up in a deceptively perky package.
10. 10 Things I Hate About You
My favorite movie of all time. I don’t need back-to-school season to make me want to watch this and transform myself into Kat Stratford — but it’s a good enough excuse. This modern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew is a time capsule filled with crop tops, combat boots, and enough feminist rage to flashback to high school when I’m painting signs for the Women’s March.
Kat Stratford — played by Julia Stiles at her eye-rolling best — is the sardonic, Sylvia Plath-reading heroine we all aspired to be but lacked the natural coolness. Meanwhile, Heath Ledger’s Patrick Verona is the bad boy with a heart of gold that launched a thousand sexual awakenings. The film’s take on high school politics feels both delightfully dated and eerily relevant — because let’s face it, adult life is just high school with more expensive wine. 10 Things is the perfect back-to-school watch when you need a reminder that it’s okay to be the “difficult” one, that grand romantic gestures involving marching bands are severely underrated, and that you should never-ever let someone tell you that you’re “incapable of loving anyone.”
11. Love and Basketball
Hear me out: half of Spike Lee’s 2000 film Love and Basketball may take place in adulthood, but it starts with the first day of school. This is the ultimate story about actually ending up with your childhood crush or high school boyfriend. Yes, it’s delusional but something’s gotta motivate me to attend my reunion in a few years. Love and Basketball follows Monica and Quincy from childhood neighbors to high school sweethearts to rival athletes, all set against the backdrop of competitive basketball.
The film perfectly captures the intensity of first love, the pressure of pursuing your dreams, and the realization that sometimes you can have it all — just not all at once. Love and Basketball is the ideal back-to-school watch for when you’re feeling sentimental about the days when your biggest worry was balancing your crush with your extracurriculars. It’s a poignant reminder that life doesn’t always follow a straight path, and sometimes you have to take a few shots before you score. And that women’s sports are just as valid as men’s sports. Play for her heart, Quincy! Play for her heart!
12. Abbott Elementary
Everyone’s favorite sitcom is the defining school-inspired drama of our era. Quinta Brunson’s masterpiece accurately portrays the chaos of elementary school while prompting us to wonder: what were our teachers up to during those years? While I don’t remember much, I’m sure I was just as much a menace as the kids in Abbott Elementary. Teachers deserve a raise, seriously. Full of hearty laughs and genuinely moving moments, this feel-good show makes me consider teaching somewhere. I won’t do it, but maybe…
13. Stranger Things
Hawkins Middle School may be full of monsters and murder, but what I would do to be part of the AV club with those nerds. Netflix’s paranormal smash hit is set in a small midwestern town and, while the last two seasons have been set in the summer, the show is at its best when our characters are balancing a fresh school year with battling the demogorgon. The wait for Season 5 is lasting as long as Senior Year felt. If those kids can get through middle school, you can make it through your next meeting. I believe in you.
For those who applaud it, any contempt expressed for the latest iteration of Mean Girls is likely to be met with the ageist rebuke of how it’s probably because you’re a millennial (granted, some millennials might be enough of a traitor to their own birth cohort to lap up this schlock). As in: “Sorry you don’t like it, bitch, but it’s Gen Z’s turn now. You’re just jealous.” The thing is, there’s not anything to be jealous of here, for nothing about this film does much to truly challenge or reinvent the status quo of the original. Which, theoretically, should be the entire point of redoing a film. Especially a film that has been so significant to pop culture. And not just millennial pop culture, but pop culture as a whole. Mean Girls, indeed, has contributed an entire vocabulary and manner of speaking to the collective lexicon. Of course, reinventing the wheel might be the expectation if this was a truly new version. Instead, it is merely a translation of the Broadway musical that kicked off in the fall of 2017, right as another cultural phenomenon was taking shape: the #MeToo movement.
This alignment with the repackaging of Mean Girls as something that a new generation could latch onto and relate with seemed timely for the heralding of a new era that not only abhorred flagrant sexual abuse against women, but also anything unpleasant whatsoever. It quickly became clear that a lot of things could be branded as “unpleasant.” Even some of the most formerly minute “linguistic nuances.” This would soon end up extending to any form of “slut-shaming” or “body-shaming.” Granted, Fey was already onto slut-shaming being “over” when she tells the junior class in the original movie, “You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores.” (They still seem to think it’s okay, by the way.)
Having had such “foresight,” Fey was also game to update and tweak a lot of other “problematic” things. From something as innocuous as having Karen say that Gretchen gets diarrhea on a Ferris wheel instead of at a Barnes & Noble (clearly, not relevant enough anymore to a generation that gets any reading advice from “BookTok”) to removing dialogue like, “I don’t hate you because you’re fat. You’re fat because I hate you” to doing away entirely with that plotline about Coach Carr (now played by Jon “Don Draper” Hamm) having sexual relationships with underage girls.
What Fey has always been super comfortable with (as most people have been), however, is ageist humor (she has plenty of anti-Madonna lines to that effect throughout 30 Rock). For example, rather than Gretchen (Bebe Wood) telling her friends that “fetch” is British slang like she does in 2004, she muses that she thinks she saw it in an “old movie,” “maybe Juno.” Because yes, everything and everyone is currently “old” in Gen Z land, though 2007 (the year of Juno’s release) was seventeen years ago, not seventy. This little dig at “old movies” is tantamount to that moment in 2005’s Monster-in-Law when Viola Fields (Jane Fonda) has to interview a pop star (very clearly modeled after Britney Spears) named Tanya Murphy (Stephanie Turner) for her talk show, Public Intimacy. Finding it difficult to relate to Tanya, Viola briefly brightens when the Britney clone says, “I love watching really old movies. They’re my favorite.” Viola nudges, “Really? Which ones?” Tanya then pulls a “Mean Girls 2024 Gretchen” by replying, “Well, um, Grease and Grease II. Um, Benji, I love Benji. Free Willy, um, Legally Blonde…uh The Little Mermaid.” By the time Tanya says Legally Blonde (four years “old” at the time of Monster-in-Law’s release), that’s about as much as Viola can take before she’s set off (though Tanya blatantly showcasing her lack of knowledge about Roe v. Wade is what, at last, prompts Viola’s physical violence). Angourie Rice, who plays a millennial in Senior Year, ought to have said something in defense of Juno, but here she’s playing the inherently ageist Gen Zer she is. Albeit a “geriatric” one who isn’t quite passing for high school student age. Not the way Rachel McAdams did at twenty-five while filming Mean Girls.
To that point, Lindsay Lohan was seventeen years old during the production and theater release of Mean Girls, while Angourie Rice was twenty-two (now twenty-three upon the movie’s theater release). Those five years make all the difference in lending a bit more, shall we say, authenticity to being a teenager. Mainly because, duh, Lohan was an actual teenager. And yes, 2004 was inarguably the height of her career success. Which is why she clings on to Mean Girls at every opportunity (complete with the Mean Girls x Wal-Mart commercial). Thus, it was no surprise to see her “cameo” by the end of the film, where she takes on the oh so significant role of Mathlete State Championship moderator, given a few notable lines (e.g., “Honey, I don’t know your life”—something that would have landed better coming from Samantha Jones) but largely serving as a reminder of how much better the original Mean Girls was and that the viewer is currently watching a dual-layered helping of, “Oh how the mighty have fallen.”
While the musical angle is meant to at least faintly set the 2024 film edition apart from the original, it’s clear that Tina Fey, from her schizophrenic viewpoint as a Gen Xer, has trouble toeing the line between post-2017 “sensitivity” and maintaining the stinging tone of what was allowed by 2004 standards. Although Gen Z is known for being “bitchy” and speaking in a manner that echoes the internet-speak amalgam of gay men meets AAVE, any attempt at “biting cuntery” is in no way present at the same level it was in 2004’s Mean Girls. And a large part of that isn’t just because “you can’t say shit anymore,” but also because the meanness of the original Regina George is completely washed out and muted. This compounded by the fact that Reneé Rapp is emblematic of a more “body positive” Regina. In other words, she’s more zaftig than the expected Barbie shape of millennial Regina. Perhaps this is why any acerbic comments on Regina’s part about other people’s looks are noticeably lacking. For example, in the original, Regina tells Cady over the phone, in reference to Gretchen (Lacey Chabert), “Cady, she’s not pretty. I mean, that sounds bad, but whatever.” Regina might say the same of the downgraded looks of the Mean Girls cast as a whole… Let’s just say, gone are the days of the polish and glamor once present in teen movies. And yet, there is still nothing “real” about what’s presented here in Mean Girls 2024. Because, again, it struggles too much with the balancing act of trying to be au courant with the fact that it was created during a time when people (read: millennials) could withstand such patent “meanness.”
In the climate of now, where bullying is all but a criminal offense resulting in severe punishment, Mean Girls no longer fits in the high school narrative of the present. This is something that the aforementioned Senior Year gets right when Stephanie (Rebel Wilson) returns to high school as thirty-seven-year-old and finds that Gen Z seems to care little about the rules of social hierarchy she knew so well as a teenage millennial. And the rules Regina George’s mom likely knew as well. Alas, Mrs. George becomes a pale imitation of Amy Poehler’s rendering, with Busy Philipps trying her best to make the role “frothy,” even when she warns Regina and co. to enjoy their youth because it will never get any better than it is right now for them (something Gen Z clearly believes based on an obsession with people being “old” that has never been seen to this extent before). The absence of her formerly blatant boob job also seems to be an arbitrary “fix” to the previous standards of beauty that were applauded and upheld in the Mean Girls of 2004 (hell, even the “fat girl” who sees Regina has gained some extra padding on her backside is the first to mock her by shouting in front of everyone, “Watch where you’re going, fat ass!”).
To boot, the curse of having to “update” things automatically entails the presence of previously unavailable technology. This, of course, takes away from the bombastic effect of Regina scattering photocopies of the Burn Book pages throughout the entire school, instead placing the book in the entry hallway to be “discovered.” And yes, the fact that the Gen Z Plastics would be using a tactile object such as this is given a one-line explanation by Regina when she asks if they made the book during the week their phones were taken away. Again proving how this “translation” doesn’t hold the same weight (no fat-shaming pun intended) or impact as before.
More vexingly still, without the indelible voiceovers from Cady, the movie becomes a hollow shell of itself, and not just because it’s now a musical lacking the punch of, at the very least, some particularly memorable lyrics (and no, “Not My Fault” playing in the credits isn’t much of a prime example of that either). And so, those who remember the gold standard of the original movie will have to settle for conjuring up the voiceovers themselves while watching (e.g., “I know it may look like I’d become a bitch, but that was only because I was acting like a bitch” and “I could hear people getting bored with me. But I couldn’t stop. It just kept coming up like word vomit”). But perhaps Fey felt that the “storytelling device” of Janis ʻImi’ike (Auliʻi Cravalho)—formerly Janis Ian—and Damian Hubbard (Jaquel Spivey)—formerly just Damian—telling it through what is presumed to be a TikTok video (this, like Senior Year, mirroring a trope established by Easy A) would be enough to both “modernize” the movie (along with Cady being raised by a single mom instead of two married parents) and compensate for its current lack of signature voiceovers.
Some might point out that there’s simply no room for voiceovers in a musical without making the whole thing too clunky. Which brings one to the question of why a musical version instead of a more legitimate reboot had to be made. Well, obviously, the answer is: money. Knowing that the same financial success of the musical would be secured by an effortless transition to film. One that ageistly promises in the trailer: “Not your mother’s Mean Girls.” Apart from the fact that it doesn’t deliver at all on any form of “raunch” that might be entailed by that tagline, as Zing Tsjeng of The Guardian pointed out, “Your mother’s? Tina Fey’s teen comedy was released nineteen years ago. Unless my mother was a child bride, I’m not sure the marketing department thought this one through.”
But of course they did. And what they thought was, “Let’s throw millennials under the bus like Regina and focus our money-making endeavors on a fresher audience.” That fresh audience being totally unschooled in the ways in which Mean Girls is a product of its time. And so, is it really supposed to be “woke” to change the indelible “fugly slut” line to “fugly cow”? As though fat-shaming is more acceptable than slut-shaming (which also occurs when Karen [Avantika] is derided by both Regina and Gretchen for having sex with eleven different “partners”—the implication perhaps being that maybe some of them weren’t boys). And obviously, Regina saying, “I know what homeschool is, I’m not retarded” had to go. The phrase “social suicide” is also apparently out (even though Olivia Rodrigo is happy to reference it in “diary of a homeschooled girl”). In general, all “strong” language has been eradicated. Something that becomes particularly notable in the “standoff” scene between Janis and Cady after the former catches her having a party despite saying she would be out of town. In this manifestation of the fight, gone are the harshly-delivered lines, “You’re a mean girl, Cady. You’re a bitch!”
Despite its thud-landing delivery, the messaging of Mean Girls remains the same. Or, to quote the original Cady (evidently an honorary Gen Zer with this zen anti-bullying stance), “Making fun of Caroline Krafft wouldn’t stop her from beating me in this contest. Calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier, calling someone stupid doesn’t make you any smarter. And ruining Regina George’s life definitely didn’t make me any happier. All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you.” Alas, Fey doesn’t solve the problem of bridging millennial pop culture into what little there is of Gen Z’s. At the end of Mean Girls 2024, the gist of Cady’s third-act message becomes (as said by Janis): “Even if you don’t like someone, chances are they still want to just coexist. So get off their dick.”
The thing is, Mean Girls 2024 can’t coexist (at least not on the same level) with Mean Girls. It’s almost like Cady Heron trying to be the new Regina George. That is to say, it just doesn’t work, and ends up backfiring spectacularly (though not from a financial standpoint, which is all that ultimately matters to most). Unfortunately, when Cady tells Damian at the end of 2004’s Mean Girls, “Hey, check it out. Junior Plastics” and then gives the voiceover, “And if any freshmen tried to disturb that peace…well, let’s just say we knew how to take care of it [cue the fantasy of the school bus running them over],” she added, “Just kidding.” And she was. Otherwise the so-called junior Plastics of Mean Girls 2024 wouldn’t be here, disturbing the millennial peace.
Just as Regina George likely would have been praised for her burgeoning badonkadonk had the original been made in the present, so, too, would she have also been praised for being a bitch. Or what Latrice Royale calls, “Being In Total Control of Herself.” In fact, that’s exactly what Reneé Rapp (who plays Regina in both the musical version and latest film edition of Mean Girls) and Megan Thee Stallion seek to achieve with their single, “Not My Fault.” A line, of course, taken directly from Lindsay Lohan as Cady Heron’s mouth when she tells Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan), “It’s not my fault you’re, like, in love with me or something.” This narcissistic dig itself borrowed from Regina (Rachel McAdams) when she told Cady that Janis was, like, “obsessed” with her when they were friends back in junior high. Proving that, in the art of “mean girl’ing,” the student surpassed the teacher as Cady came up with a better way to phrase it.
Alas, back in 2004, it was frowned upon to be an outright bitch. To be sure, it was really only the gays—ahead of the curve on trends as usual—who revered the cunty women of this world (see: that scene in Truth or Dare when one of Madonna’s dancers gushes, “I love it when she’s mean”). As time has gone on, and views/attitudes about how a girl should “be” have evolved, it’s now actually become more frowned upon to be “nice” as a woman than it is to be a so-called bitch (a.k.a. acting the way men do without consequence all the time). To that point, when a woman is “nice”—better known as “meek”—she’s presently more likely to be accused of perpetuating the vicious cycle of (white) silence that has allowed patriarchy to thrive unchecked for so long.
So it is that with the “upgrade” of Mean Girls into the later twenty-first century (which hardly means that it can ever compare to the original), an according soundtrack upgrade has come with it. Thus, aligning the “woke” messaging of the “new” movie with the new music. Enter Megan Thee Stallion (no stranger to Mean Girls homages after her 2021 Coach ad campaign) to assist the “new queen bee” (but, honestly, there is no replacement for Rachel McAdams), Reneé Rapp, on the rather flaccid “Not My Fault.” Indeed, it sounds like something from the Meghan Trainor reject pile, and far beneath Megan Thee Stallion’s usual collaborations. And, speaking of far beneath someone, the recent appalling Mean Girls x Wal-Mart commercial featuring the original cast was noticeably missing the presence of McAdams as Regina (because, really, what sensible person would want to be part of such grim fan fiction?). Soon after the release of the none too subtle Trojan horse for capitalism via millennial nostalgia, McAdams had no problem explaining her absence by remarking, “I guess I wasn’t that excited about doing a commercial if I’m being totally honest. A movie sounded awesome, but I’ve never done commercials, and it just didn’t feel like my bag.” Translation: “that’s the ugliest f-ing commercial concept I’ve ever seen.”
The same goes for the first single to represent the latest Mean Girls Soundtrack, with Rapp seeming to have taken overt inspiration from Britney Spears’ anachronistic “Mind Your Business.” While Britney sing-chants, “Where she at? Where she at? Where she at? Where she at? Where she at?/There she go, there she go, there she go, there she go, there she go/What she do? What she do? What she do?” Rapp simplifies it down to, “Where she at? (where she at?)/What she doin’? (what she doin’?)/Who she with and where she from?” Just another vexing manner in which Gen Z feels obliged to copy millennials (despite constantly branding them as cringe) while seeming to genuinely believe they’ve come up with something “unique.” However, the accompanying video, directed by Mia Barnes, doesn’t bother pretending to be anything innovative, mostly stealing its costuming from the Barbie-meets-Pam-Anderson-in-the-90s playbook.
With the majority of the “narrative” flashing to scenes from the movie in between Rapp and Thee Stallion parading around in their aforementioned Barbie/Pamela pink stylings (complete with furry hats), there’s also a long scene of Rapp getting “Regina George” tattooed in various fonts on various parts of her body. Another moment shows Megan and Reneé standing between two rows of Regina-inspired mannequins before taking baseball bats to them. Almost as if, in some faux “poetic” way, they’re trying to tell us that they’re destroying the “old” Regina George (“Sorry, the old Regina can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Because she’s dead”). The one who was lambasted for being a “bitch” and then decided to amend her ways at the end of the film by channeling her rage into lacrosse.
Rapp confirms this “rebranding” with the lyrics, “I’m not on the same shit from before/I can’t take this pettiness, now I’m bored, uh-huh/We can share, babe, there’s enough for us all [an obvious nod to Cady sharing the pieces of her seemingly endless tiara]/Told you who I am and what it is, that’s not my fault.” In other words, she won’t be apologizing for simply being her undiluted self. Then again, no one is much interested in that self when she’s standing next to Megan Thee Stallion, who viewers have to wait a full one minute and forty-four seconds to hear deliver her verse (making it somewhat awkward to see her dance and prance around next to Rapp for that entire time). Rising to the occasion of embodying her “Black Regina George” status, she appears in a tank top with holes cut out at the nipples to reveal a purple bra à la 2004 Regina after Janis, Damian (Daniel Franzese) and Cady fail to sabotage her outfit because she ends up “making it fashion.”
Megan then carries the song out of the bowels it began in by rapping, “I’m a mood, borin’ whores gotta Pinterest me.” This being the crux of the song’s statement about how “bitches” are really just women who express themselves without fear of reprisal (including the usual “comeuppance” of being called a bitch, especially by men). So it is that Thee Stallion also adds, “It’s funny how the mean girl open all the doors” and “I got influence, they do anything I endorse/I run shit, to be a bad bitch is a sport.” And an art. One that, to Tina Fey’s chagrin, cannot be topped by the original gangster of mean girl’ing that is Rachel McAdams’ Regina. Who Megan and Reneé once again pay tribute to at the end of the video by sipping from matching teacups, with Megan’s reading, “Boo You” and Rapp’s reading, of course, “Whore.”
But, like “bitch,” “whore” now has a much more positive connotation than it did in 2004. That wasn’t the case when Regina was using it in a more “SWERF”-sounding than sex-positive manner when directing it at Karen (Amanda Seyfried). But then, this is also the girl who didn’t want to invite a potential lesbian to her birthday party. So yeah, it’s much harder for Regina to be mean in the same way in the present as she was in the past. Which, in the end, invites the question: how much of a bitch can she really be amid post-woke culture?
In 2023, Wal-Mart has so “generously” allowed us to catch a glimpse into the lives of where the mean girls from 2004 are now. Not only that, but this version of 2023 ostensibly exists in an alternate realm where the name Karen (and Karen Smith, no less) isn’t something worthy of calling attention to. Not at any point during the extremely lengthy commercial (almost a full two minutes [an “epic” in the realm of advertising], which means Wal-Mart really shelled out for it). Though there were plenty of other “plot points” that attention was called to in terms of assessing where some of the Mean Girls characters have ended up. And, let’s just say it, the assumptions to be made are rather grim.
For a start, Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) is still hanging out with Gretchen (Lacey Chabert) and Karen (Amanda Seyfried). Are we really to believe that Cady would have remained friends with anyone from The Plastics (particularly since she informs viewers at the end of the movie, “In case you’re wondering, The Plastics broke up”)? And if one person was worth remaining friends with, wouldn’t it have been Regina? If for no other reason than she had a mind of her own. Or, as Damian (Daniel Franzese) said, “She’s the queen bee, the star. Those other two are just her little workers.” Later on in Mean Girls, Cady marvels, “Was I the new queen bee?” It seems that, for the purposes of this Wal-Mart commercial, yes, she is. Even if she’s now a guidance counselor. Arguably one of the bleakest aspects about this flash forward to the mean girls’ future. That, and it seems that Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) isn’t friends with her or Damian anymore, having likely moved on to bigger and better things outside of the Chicago area.
Perhaps this is why Cady has resorted to a continued friendship with Gretchen and Karen. The latter of whom appears to be doing a “weather report” for no one’s benefit but her own—and yeah, it’s a bit sad that she’s still skulking around the high school to do it. They should have at least shown her doing “weather” for a local channel, and maybe even alluding to the climate change factors that have become unignorable in the years since 2004. Though, somehow, the next scene transition occurs by showing Karen on the big screen of Kevin Gnapoor’s (Rajiv Surendra) living room, even though it would make no sense for Karen to broadcast from North Shore High School if she was a legitimate “weather girl.”
But that’s not supposed to be the viewer’s focus as the camera whip-pans to Kevin’s son holding a twenty-five-dollar (because of course the price flashes on the screen) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RC in his hands (with a Hot Wheels and Barbie box in the background, to boot). After all, it’s so important that Generation Alpha understands the importance of material goods, too. That job has already been done on Gen Z, who, although positioned as “climate-conscious” and “embracing of all sexual and ethnic identifications,” ain’t really none of that based on what one actually sees outside of think pieces concerning said birth cohort. Kevin then half-heartedly tells his son, “Don’t let the haters stop you from doing your thang, Kevin Jr.,” as though he has little will left to believe that himself. And clearly, if Janis isn’t in this scene, it means she dumped his ass along with Cady and Damian’s, too.
As for Gretchen, she’s apparently been a young mom since roughly 2007 (if we’re to believe her daughter is sixteen, and Mean Girls came out in 2004, when Gretchen would have been sixteen herself). Not only does she have a high school-age daughter named Amber who seems more Regina than Gretchen, she also has two younger kids as well. All of whom are Asian, though there’s no sign of the Asian husband she presumably married as a result of immersing herself in an Asian clique at the end of Mean Girls (this being a hyper-specific detail for the Wal-Mart commercial to include).
Cady’s life also appears rather empty based on her purchases of “Apple AirPods and Legos,” though that doesn’t seem to stop one stalker-y student from wanting to imitate that purchase the way Bethany Byrd (Stefanie Drummond) did with Regina George’s Army pants and flip flops. It’s never really made clear if Cady does have kids of her own (hence, the reason for buying Legos?), but it is clear that she has no compunction about displaying a pathetic mug on her desk that reads, “Best Guidance Counselor Ever.” Perhaps this level of patheticness is her karma for calling Ms. Norbury (Tina Fey) a “sad old drug pusher” back when she was a student instead of a “teacher.” And maybe her additional karma for all that high school fuckery was not ending up with Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett), who is nowhere to be found…perhaps because the real-life Aaron Samuels turned out to be gay (which is why he was more willing to appear as that character in Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next” video).
Nonetheless, Cady does her best to maintain “plucky” narrations as she remarks, “Even as the guidance counselor, I was still getting schooled.” Yes, by the Gen Z tits who are even more asshole-ish than millennials were (this despite the former’s reputation for “tolerance”). So while Gretchen appears to have an absentee Asian husband as she lives out her tragic lawnmower mom life, Cady is working for a middling wage at the same high school she attended twenty years ago. Maybe the only person with a more depressing fate is Damian, who, for whatever reason, is working the projector for the Winter Talent Show.
Possibly the one thing that could be more heinous is if Karen ended up marrying her “first cousin,” Seth Mosakowski, and having inbred, even dumber children with him. In any case, there’s obviously a reason why Regina George is no longer consorting with any of these “losers.” Because, evidently, she didn’t peak in high school as expected…the way all the others appear to have done just that. One would instead like to believe that she and Janis have finally consummated their long overdue lesbian relationship and are proud owners of a kinky sex shop that also sells lacrosse gear (which itself can double as sex toys) somewhere in L.A.
Apart from being one of the most overt pieces of capitalist propaganda to wield pop culture in recent memory, the Mean Girls x Wal-Mart commercial is a stark reminder not just of Gen Z contempt for millennials, but for their simultaneous desire to emulate them. After all, there’s a fine line between hate and love, as it is said. And, to quote Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), it’s not millennials’ fault that Gen Z “is like in love with them or something.” At least, if one is to go by the obsession with their era (even when trying to deride it through an over-the-top condemnation of skinny jeans and side parts).
Within the absurd universe of 2023-era Mean Girls, Gen Z is somehow the spawn of Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert), while Cady (Lindsay Lohan) and Karen (Amanda Seyfried) don’t seem to have any clear claim on children of their own (unless it’s the other two members of Amber Wieners’ Gen Z clique). And maybe Cady is too busy “nurturing” youths in her role as a guidance counselor anyway to bother with children of her own. Which brings us to a scene designed to make her look out of touch in an “old” way rather than a “cute” one (as she did in 2004 whilst talking to Aaron Samuels [Jonathan Bennett]). Since everything is “cute” when you’re young enough…as society has drummed into our collective minds by now. This occurs when, sitting behind her desk dispensing “guidance” to a duo of mean girls, she once again says, “Grool.”
The duo looks at her like she’s a “Martian” (as Regina called her) after she utters, apropos of nothing, “Grool.” At least when she said it in the actual movie, it was a conflated response to Aaron declaring of his Halloween party invite, “That flier admits one person only, so…don’t bring some other guy with you.” She started to say “great,” then “cool”—ergo, “Grool.” But how would these Gen Z putas living their far more “glamorous” life be expected to know anything about that “lore.” So naturally, they look up from their phones long enough to respond with disgust, “Huh?” and “What’s ‘grool’?” Cady assures, “It’s nothing.”
Almost as “nothing” as Gen Z claims millennials are to them despite constantly turning to Mean Girls as a behavioral bible and/or source of 00s yearning/“aesthetic” inspiration. And in the Wal-Mart commercial, that emulation comes both behaviorally and sartorially as Gretchen’s daughter and her friends wear the same pastels and plaids as the original Plastics did. Even though Cady was sure to tell us at the end of Mean Girls (after Damian [Daniel Franzese] delightedly warns of a freshman trio of girls, “Check it out, Junior Plastics”), “And if any freshmen tried to disturb that peace…well, let’s just say we knew how to take care of it.” Cue Cady imagining a school bus running the trio over and then assuring, “Just kidding.” But, of course, there are surely many millennials by now who have had such violent and hostile fantasies about cartoonishly ageist Gen Z. Particularly since, as we see exhibited by the Gen Z Plastics of the Wal-Mart commercial, they’re essentially grafting what millennials did while simultaneously critiquing them. Mainly for being “old” and for having never experienced the horrors of modern-day smartphone/social media life in their teens the way Gen Z is now.
To that point, Gretchen has happily taken on a Mrs. George-esque (Amy Poehler) persona by becoming not like a regular mom, but a cool mom as she sets up the ring light and camera to film Amber and her bitch friends doing limply-executed dances, presumably for TikTok. Amber then snaps at her mother when she says, “This is gonna be so fetch.” Amber’s response? “Stop trying to make fetch happen, Mom. It’s still not gonna happen.” Gretchen looks deeply wounded by this, for surely it’s gotta sting more coming from her daughter than Regina George. Her daughter, mind you, who knows nothing about millennial culture because not only did she not live through it, but everything about it has been diluted and bastardized by TikTok. Including Mean Girls itself.
This usually extends to the oft-referenced Winter Talent Show scene, which is recreated here as well (albeit with “smart” flat-heeled boots in lieu of stiletto-heeled ones). Even though Gretchen (and Cady/Karen, for that matter) would have needed to get pregnant right after high school, circa 2007-2009, to have a high school-age daughter. The probability of this seems rather unlikely (unless you’re Lorelai Gilmore), considering her Type A personality and “good” college/“respectable” career path. Even if having kids and marrying a “similar-minded/pedigreed” man was also at the forefront of her mind, that wouldn’t have been until, realistically, at least her mid-twenties. But, for the sake of capitalist propaganda, we must suspend our disbelief as Gretchen (joined by two more children who also appear to be Asian, which means she definitely didn’t marry Jason [Daniel DeSanto]), Cady and Karen watch a “less hot version” of themselves perform the same song and dance that they did “back in the day.” To far greater ennui…even though Gretchen takes over for Mrs. George on the filming front.
By the end of the commercial, the movie has been so perverted from its original self that the Burn Book pages plastered all over the school have been transformed into ads for Wal-Mart Black Friday deals instead of salacious pieces of gossip (many of which wouldn’t fly in the Gen Z climate of the present, where jokes about people being fat, or slutty, or statutory rapists would probably be deemed too insensitive).
And yet, while millennial messaging has been “massaged” to suit a Gen Z demographic in this commercial (not just with the Burn Book being nothing but a “coupon book,” but also Gretchen having her son play with a Barbie), it is still Gen Z trying to be “analog” in the end by engaging with printouts. This being just one of the many ways, throughout the commercial, in which they’ve surrendered to their worst, most “cringe” fear: “being millennial.”
As the “reunion” that everyone’s been waiting for, it was practically inevitable that the Mean Girls “assembly” (high school pun intended) would disappoint. Mainly because, yes, the so-called reunion is a fucking Wal-Mart commercial. That said, it actually seems as though, rather than people being disappointed by it, they’re somehow delighted. Dare one say…“tickled.” But the reason behind that appears to be less about content and more about an increasing fiendishness for nostalgia, especially among millennials. And no, it’s not because they’re, as Gen Z would falsely bill them, “old,” but because it’s glaringly apparent that times in 2004 were far more bearable—fun, even (remember fun?)—than times in 2023.
Of course, naysayers and “pro-progressive” types would argue that life was so much worse back then (see: the media manipulation and vilification of women like Britney Spears). That we’ve come “such a long way” (or “such a long way,” as Gretchen Wieners [Lacey Chabert] would utter it) in our perception of things (“thing” being the word that still describes how men see women) and our “tolerance for others” (read: white people in print and media making flaccid attempts at “inclusivity”). But the truth is, psychologically, society has gone further back into the Dark Ages with its mentality—particularly toward women and minorities (who are only viewed as minorities by the white people who only make up about eight percent of the world’s population). So yeah, a throwback to 2004 is bound to feel pretty fucking great right now. Like sweet candy compared to the tasteless gruel (a riff on “grool,” obviously) being served up on a daily basis in this part of the century.
What’s more, 2004 was still within a prime era for the U.S. in terms of continuing to hold up capitalism as what George W. Bush would later call “the best system ever devised.” To that end, one would like to believe the Mean Girls x Wal-Mart commercial is a wink-wink nod to the Bush years’ unironic exaltation of capitalism, but no, that’s clearly not the case. In fact, this capitalistic propaganda posing as “Mean Girls nostalgia” at its worst treats the viewers as though they themselves still live in 2004, when it was easier to pretend “deal shopping” for Black Friday isn’t the very thing that’s helped to make 2023 even more of a dystopia compared to 2004. Or that the presence of Missy Elliott (whose song, “Pass That Dutch,” plays repeatedly throughout the original Mean Girls, therefore this commercial) spelling out “D-E-A-L-S” instead of “K-L-A” (that’s how Coach Carr [Dwayne Hill] spells “chlamydia”) somehow makes the human predilection for consumerism more “kosher.” As does, according to the commercial creators, Gretchen Wieners replacing Regina George (Rachel McAdams) in the silver Lexus convertible. Except it’s now a brandless convertible of a nondescript tone.
That’s right, since Rachel McAdams announced simply that she “didn’t want to” be part of the little puff piece for capitalism, they got Chabert to fill in for one of McAdams’ key moments from the film. So in lieu of Regina pulling up to the soccer field and shouting, “Get in loser, we’re going shopping,” Gretchen does. And no, it’s not to pick up Cady (Lindsay Lohan) and Karen (Amanda Seyfried), but rather, her own high school-age daughter (which doesn’t quite mathematically track), Amber Wieners. Amber stands on the field with her clique comprised of the next generation mean girls, and is absolutely mortified (could it be because Gen Z is supposed to be more environmentally concerned? No, it’s because, no matter what era you’re in, parents are always humiliating) when Gretchen cries out, “Get in sweetie, we’re going deals shopping!” Even though the back of her car is already piled high with plenty of shit from Wal-Mart. Because what it the American message if not, even to this day: excess!
So it is that the Mean Girls x Wal-Mart “partnership” wields nostalgia like a seductive and deadly weapon to keep encouraging the very capitalistic behavior that will be humanity’s undoing. Behavior that millennials once got to relish in the 00s without half as much guilt about it as there is now (and mainly only because of Greta Thunberg). Yet that’s the the thing, isn’ it? There’s still clearly not enough guilt or compunction about it if a commercial like this can exist…and continue to be so gleefully embraced. The same goes for the abominable Menulog commercial starring Latto and Christina Aguilera. Both employ the same method of assaulting the audience with “eye candy” and familiar 00s nostalgia (via Christina Aguilera) to distract from the obvious point: we want you to keep engaging in the same buying patterns as the very generation you and Gen Z are constantly railing against—baby boomers. And in this scenario, it makes all the sense in the world that millennials are also known as echo boomers. Just look at the way Cady, Gretchen and Karen are living. That is to say, in the exact same way as their own parents.
The warm reception toward this commercial (and its tainting of the original movie) is, accordingly, a sign of how desperately so many people want to deny the reality of now. One in which the idea of Cady, Gretchen and Karen (though, pointedly, not Regina) continuing to carry out the same toxic consumerist cycle of the generation before them is a comfort rather than a horror show. After all, millennials were supposed to be different—they were supposed to want something more (besides more material goods). And yet, like the yippies of the 1960s who became yuppies in the 1980s (see: Jerry Rubin), millennials, if we’re to go by this commercial, have gladly sold out in the same way to keep the very system that has failed them (perhaps more than anyone) going.
It does seem fitting, in this regard that McAdams, the lone Gen Xer of the group (a.k.a. the “eldest” of the quartet at forty-four) opted to opt out. Perhaps old enough to know she doesn’t really want to be part of this schlock under the pretense of it being something “for the fans” when, obviously, it’s for nobody’s benefit other than the capitalist agenda’s, which has been using pop culture for decades upon decades to promote its purpose. This brings us to the fact that a “Mean Girls” commercial has already been recently used to promote a brand: Coach. Yes, back in 2021, Megan Thee Stallion stepped into the role of Regina George (because McAdams so patently doesn’t want to) to help recreate the introduction scene to the leader of The Plastics and, of course, sell some overpriced handbags.
Then there was a 2022 Allbirds commercial wherein Lohan, as usual, capitalized on Mean Girls(one of her only viable movies) to sell some shoes by peppering in “subtle” references to the movie. Like how she was a mathlete in high school. She then goes to pick out a pair of pink running shoes and says, “Well, it is Wednesday.” More “hardy-har-har” allusions arrive when she adds, “These don’t just look cute. They’re made with natural materials…always avoid the plastics,” followed by, “Bouncy. Perfect for a queen bee like Lindsay Lohan.” The point being, it’s fairly evident that, for whatever reason, Mean Girls has become a go-to for bolstering consumer faith in capitalism. And again, that’s arguably because 2004 was such a peak time for worshiping it. But what’s past doesn’t have to be present…so long as you’re not seduced by it. Therein lies the catch.
“I wonder how seriously she takes us,” Amanda Seyfried whispers, referring to the big-name celebrity quietly smirking across the room. The woman strikes me as the silent-judging type, but Seyfried is more open-minded. “It’s judgment,” the actor considers, “or it’s just innocent curiosity.” After all, it’s not every day that Lisa Gherardini, better known as the selfie-magnet Mona Lisa, gets a near-private audience with an Oscar nominee—a startling beauty known to turn up on Lancôme billboards and magazine covers. “How big is that, dimension-wise?” Seyfried wonders about Da Vinci’s 16th-century painting, encased in bulletproof glass. A nearby voice ballparks it at 36 by 24 inches, which sounds like the start of a bust-waist-hips measurement. “‘36, 25, 34’—was that from a Nelly song?” Seyfried asks, before supplying her own melodic answer with a line from the rapper’s Y2K anthem: “If you want to go and take a ride with me…” One imagines Lisa the wallflower, having seen and heard it all, softly humming along. A nostalgic hit has its sweetness, but also its flaws. “That was supposed to depict the perfect female form,” says Seyfried, “which is obviously bullshit.”
Two familiar faces share a moment. Makeup artist Genevieve Herr and hairstylist Renato Campora prepped Seyfried for the occasion. The dress is by Prada.
By Ludovica Arcero/Courtesy of Lancôme.
The matter of idealized beauty—how to define it, and, more important, redefine it—is a recurring theme at the Louvre on a balmy Tuesday evening, where a crowd of hundreds has gathered under I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid to fete the museum’s partnership with Lancôme. Spindly display stands show off the limited-edition eye palette, its embossed shadows inspired by an 1836 bust of the ancient Greek poet Corinne. Nearby, bottles of Advanced Génifique serum (a conservator’s approach to preservation) occupy a set of black pedestals; lipsticks in faux marble cases sit on gold ones. Meanwhile, four of the beauty brand’s ambassadors—Seyfried, along with Zendaya, Chinese model He Cong, and Malian-French musician Aya Nakamura—have taken their own places on the walls, by way of mural-size campaign images that pair each woman with an emblematic artwork. Some of the statues are unmistakable, like The Winged Victory of Samothrace, which Zendaya mirrors with an outstretched arm. Seyfried, whose Catskills farm has been a refuge for the past decade, finds her muse in the Diana of Gabii, a Greek tribute to the goddess of the hunt. The larger-than-life figure—once a jewel in the Borghese collection and later Napoleon’s—has long been a popular lady. So is Seyfried, whose bright pink Prada dress acts like a homing beacon for just about every fan and friend.
On the surface, the co-branded collection might seem like an unusual rendezvous for the two heritage institutions. “It’s not! It’s so refined, it’s so specific, it’s so well-curated,” Seyfried counters, as she slips out of cocktail hour for the private tour. “The thing about museums is you go there to get lost and you go there to get found, to find yourself,” she says—something that beauty, with its tools for transformation, can tap into as well. The actor pauses in a spacious room where Ingres’s 1814 La Grande Odalisque slyly holds court. “I love humans, I love these mythical snapshots—but landscapes,” she sighs in front of Paul Flandrin’s 1838 Montagnes de la Sabine, a lush, unassuming painting with just the hint of manmade intervention, namely the cluster of figures near the bottom and a columned temple hidden in the trees. Beyond an aesthetic experience, these galleries hold the possibility for connection, as Seyfried sees it, a chance to build a cross-generational bridge. (Film does too, which has the actor alluding to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike—a consequence of artists “being taken for granted and almost disrespected, in some ways, because of financial things.”)
The Lancôme x Louvre campaign pairs Seyfried with the Diana of Gabii.
By Sølve Sundsbø/Courtesy of Lancôme.
But it’s the classical statuary that we are beelining for. The majestic Winged Victory, occupying a solitary perch on a stair landing, is all flash-frozen power. “You feel the space, you feel the possibility,” Seyfried says of that potential waiting to be set loose. A short walk on, the Venus de Milo gets an intimately scaled gallery to herself. Suddenly a barnyard braying emanates from the actor’s evening bag. “That’s my donkey!” Seyfried chirps, scurrying to her phone. (Technically speaking, it’s not her actual donkey on the recording, but a ringtone stand-in for logistical ease.) She answers the FaceTime call by striking a nonchalant pose with Venus. “Tommy? Oh, no big deal. We’re literally walking around the Louvre right now,” she says to her husband, Thomas Sadoski. A tiny voice belonging to their 3-year-old son pipes in. “I don’t have your toy, Bubba,” Seyfried cajoles, with one last attempt at a grand gesture: “This is art! This is history!” Someone in the group suggests a child-size Venus de Milo as a souvenir. “I’ve already got him an alien and a car,” she says. “Way better than this.”
Seyfried knows what she wants, as evidenced by the life she has built around family (her daughter is 6) and nature. Two new horses have settled in at the farm this week, which brings the menagerie tally—she pauses to count in her head—to “16 big animals, not counting the chickens and the ducks.” It’s mostly an equine mix, including the donkey, pony, and miniature horses, plus goats. It makes sense that a woman of the land feels a kinship with this marble Diana, caught in a self-sufficient moment as she fastens her cloak. In the press notes for the Lancôme x Louvre collection, Seyfried calls her a “wild goddess,” despite an outwardly delicate appearance. “Claiming her own independence: that’s where her beauty comes from.”
TORONTO — Director Atom Egoyan is set to premiere his film “Seven Veils” tonight, in a unique collaboration with the Canadian Opera Company and the Toronto International Film Festival.
The special “avant-premiere” will take place at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, with the official TIFF screening taking place Sunday at the Princess of Wales Theatre.
“Seven Veils,” starring Amanda Seyfried, tells the story of a theatre director whose world unwinds as she reworks a production of “Salome” after the death of her mentor, who was previously in charge.
Egoyan directed “Salome” for the Canadian Opera Company in 1996. It depicts the beheading of John the Baptist at the behest of Jewish princess Salome.
Egoyan has said the work carries deeply personal themes about concealed wounds, which have also been a staple in several of his early works.
However, Seyfried won’t be walking the red carpet due to an ongoing strike by members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio.
The U.S. actress said in a social media post that even though “Seven Veils” received a “waiver” from U.S. actors union, it “doesn’t feel right” to promote it at TIFF during the strike.
The words “Tom Holland” and “spoilers” can immediately illicit snickering. There are compilation videos on YouTube of the “Spider-Man ” star accidentally revealing too much about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. His slip-ups and near-giveaways have become a running joke among his co-stars and filmmakers. The actor found himself in familiar territory with his new twisty, surprise-laden series “The Crowded Room,” now streaming on Apple TV+ — and says by comparison, keeping quiet about Marvel is a piece of cake.
“With Marvel… it’s all about the villain, the costume, the locations, the end result. They’re relatively easy to keep those things a secret,” said Holland in a recent interview. “I know that sounds stupid coming from me because I spoil everything, but with ‘The Crowded Room’ there are so many twists and turns in this show that people won’t be expecting. It really is a puzzle.”
The limited-series takes place in 1970s New York with Holland as Danny, a young man arrested in connection with a crime. His accomplices are nowhere to be found and an investigator assigned to the case (played by Amanda Seyfried) conducts a series of interviews with Danny to piece together his involvement.
Holland and Seyfried filmed their scenes — out of order — “for almost three weeks straight” in an interrogation room.
“It sometimes was confusing. I needed to know exactly where I was in the process with Danny, how much we knew or how much the audience knew and how much (Seyfried’s character) Rya knew,” she explained. “It was tricky.”
Holland credits Seyfried for keeping him on track as they “did over 100 pages of dialogue at that one table in that one room.”
“Amanda is so talented, she’s so professional. She’s able to keep it light when it’s dark,” he said. “There were certain times in that room where we were both just losing our minds, just scenes after scenes, after scenes after scenes. We were just a great team.”
Holland describes his work on ‘The Crowded Room’ as “the hardest job I’ve ever had, but equally probably the most rewarding.
“Danny is an exhausting character. Going to those places on a daily basis, having that haircut, shooting on the streets of New York, it was tough. It was not an easy show to make,” but says watching the end result made him “happy that I dug my heels in and stuck with it.”
“It was a really, really tough experience without a shadow of a doubt.” He says halfway through filming he “was counting down the days that I could take … off and have some time to myself.”
He also served as a co-executive producer for the first time, which helped him to finally understand what the job entails.
“I spent the first 15 years of my career on set being like, ‘What do all of these people do? They’re all just sitting there.’ But having been a producer now myself, it is one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done. You’re shooting in a car and the car breaks down and all of a sudden you’re trying to figure out how to get a new car or how to turn the scene into a walking scene and all that sort of stuff.”
Since beginning his performing career at 11 in “Billy Elliott the Musical,” in London’s West End, Holland says his formal education has been “somewhat non-existent” so he appreciates the learning opportunities he gets from working.
With “The Crowded Room” Holland says “I learned a lot about myself. I learned about my capabilities as an actor. I learned about things that I can put up with. I feel like I’m much more capable at dealing with adversities and fighting against things that are going wrong on set. I learned a lot about mental health. I learned a lot about the power of the human mind and the amazing things we can do to protect ourselves, to heal and to survive.”
“Listen—no time to explain, but in 2027, someone known as ‘Mr. Beast’ is nominated for Best Director for a film called Coincidentally Spearman. He must not win! If this happens, a timeline is created wherein billions will perish. I have to go—I’ve used all of my time credits on this final jump, and if I stay around any longer, the multiverse will implode.”
Amanda Seyfried casually mentioned that Blake Lively was almost cast as Karen in “Mean Girls” instead of her while participating in a video for Vanity Fair in which she revisited some of her most famous roles.
Seyfried mentioned Lively while explaining she had initially auditioned for the role of Regina (who was eventually played by Rachel McAdams).
“And I’d flown out to LA for the first time with my mother,” Seyfried recalled. “It was very exciting. I met Lacey Chabert for the first time, and Lindsay Lohan was in the room, and Blake Lively was playing Karen. And then I was Regina.”
The “Dropout” star said that after she flew home, she got a call in which she was told casting thought she was better suited for the role of Karen.
Seyfried said she then enlisted the help of a comedic director, and together they came up with Karen’s signature whispery voice, which was inspired by Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like it Hot.”
“I remember the feeling of everybody really wanting to be there and really appreciating the ingenious of the script,” Seyfried said of the iconic teen comedy. I remember everybody having a lot of fun. There was just a vibe … they cast it right.”
Although the news that Lively could have played the ditzy character whose breasts can tell it’s raining thanks to her ESPN, this isn’t the first time Lively’s early involvement with “Mean Girls” has been mentioned publicly.
Mean Girls casting director Marci Liroff told Cosmopolitan in 2019 how the “Mama Mia” star was cast instead of Lively. Liroff told the magazine that “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels suggested they put Seyfried in the role.
“We wanted Blake Lively, who hadn’t done the ‘Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants’ yet, for Karen,” Marci said, noting that Blake had been the number one choice. “She came down to the final tests but, at some point, some of the filmmakers said to keep looking.”
She added: “Amanda Seyfried had read for Regina, and we really liked her but then Lorne suggested, ‘Why don’t we make her Karen?’”
Everyone has an ABBA earworm that they know by heart—but Mamma Mia! star Amanda Seyfried has at least one that she’d be happy to never hear again. “The ‘Voulez-Vous’ song in this scene is just so traumatic,” the Emmy winner said while revisiting clips from her career with Vanity Fair. “We spent so long learning this choreography, and I can fake being a good dancer—I didn’t in this. I was just bad…. It’s like, the one ABBA song that I just never wanna hear.”
Although she’s pressing skip on an ABBA track or two, Seyfried admitted that 2008’s Mamma Mia! “is the movie that changed my life,” adding, “I went from getting guest stars, doing small movies for the most part, to being the front-and-center character in a massive, massive movie. I got to work with all these incredible people. Meryl Streep is my mother.”
The actor also got to work with three high-profile men, one of whom is her character’s biological father—Pierce Brosnan,Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård. Although his true identity is never revealed, Seyfried has picked her favorite. “I always secretly hoped it was Stellan that was really her father—Bill,” she told VF. “He was the person who seemed the least likely to want to have kids, and I think from realization to acceptance…there is a scene that was cut [with] a song called ‘Name of the Game,’ and we sing it together…. I just really loved that moment with him.” Seyfried added, “We actually did a movie right after where he played my boyfriend, so try that on.”
In her walk down memory lane, Seyfried also recalled auditioning for the role of Karen in Mean Girls—a part Blake Lively was also up for—shooting Jennifer’s Body alongside Megan Fox, singing live for Les Misérables (“I wish I could do it all over again”), and begging for a second season playingdefamed Theranos founder Elizabeth HolmesinThe Dropout. Watch the full video above.
Amanda Seyfried is experiencing a wardrobe malfunction.
The actress arrived at the 2023 Critics Choice Awards in a beautiful gold dress from French fashion house, styled by Elizabeth Stewart, but it just didn’t want to stay on.
Speaking with Access Hollywood, Seyfried revealed the gown kept “ripping and actually breaking.”
It was made of a single piece of twisted, fringed gold lamé chiffon and was from the label’s Spring-Summer 2020 collection.
She may be the star of “The Dropout”, but Amanda Seyfried is top of the style class this evening. – Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Critics Choice Association
— Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Critics Choice Association
Despite the fashion hiccup, the actress was hopeful.
“It’s a statue dress so if I don’t get one, at least I look like one,” she joked.
The dress ended up bringing her luck as “The Dropout” actress won the award for Best Actress in a Limited Series for her work in the show.
People reports, however, that when walking up to the stage to receive the reward for Best Limited Series, she had a black jacket on and her hair down, perhaps hiding the broken dress.
Thelma & Louise’s ride of a lifetime is reportedly getting the musical treatment. Amanda Seyfried is involved with a workshop for the musical version of the Oscar-winning film, with Evan Rachel Wood reportedly joining her, according to Variety.
Adding song and dance to the tale of two fiercely loyal friends whose road trip turns criminal has been in the works since at least 2021. Callie Khouri, who won an Academy Award for penning the 1991 screenplay, is attached to the project in some capacity. Singer-songwriter Neko Case and Halley Feiffer are also on board for the score and the book, respectively. Back in 2021, Trip Cullman was tapped to direct.
This seemingly solves the mystery of Seyfried’s unnamed musical project, which was cited as the reason she couldn’t accept her award at the 2023 Golden Globes, where she won best actress in a limited series, anthology series, or television motion picture for her performance as disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout. “Amanda Seyfried is deep in the process of creating a new musical this week and could not be here tonight,” presenters told the audience. Seyfried later accepted her honor on Instagram. “I had to miss it because I am working on something that is magic, and it’s musical,” she began, “so I’m finally getting to do something that I’ve never really done.”
The original film starred Geena Davis as Thelma and Susan Sarandon as Louise, and while it’s not clear which actor will play which role in the musical, neither one is a stranger to the musical genre. Seyfried starred in both Mamma Mia! films, 2012’s adaptation of Les Misérables, and even campaigned for the role of Glinda in Wicked—a part that ultimately went to Ariana Grande. As for Wood, she starred in 2007’s Beatles-centered musical, Across the Universe, and later voiced Anna and Elsa’s mom in Frozen II.Vanity Fair has reached out to reps for Seyfried and Wood for comment.
Today is Saturday, Dec. 3, the 337th day of 2022. There are 28 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Dec. 3, 1984, thousands of people died after a cloud of methyl isocyanate gas escaped from a pesticide plant operated by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India.
On this date:
In 1818, Illinois was admitted as the 21st state.
In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected president of the United States by the Electoral College.
In 1947, the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire” opened on Broadway.
In 1964, police arrested some 800 students at the University of California at Berkeley, one day after the students stormed the administration building and staged a massive sit-in.
In 1965, the Beatles’ sixth studio album, “Rubber Soul,” was released in the United Kingdom by Parlophone (it was released in the U.S. by Capitol Records three days later).
In 1967, a surgical team in Cape Town, South Africa, led by Dr. Christiaan Barnard (BAHR’-nard) performed the first human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky, who lived 18 days with the donor organ, which came from Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old bank clerk who had died in a traffic accident.
In 1979, 11 people were killed in a crush of fans at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum, where the British rock group The Who was performing.
In 1991, radicals in Lebanon released American hostage Alann Steen, who’d been held captive nearly five years.
In 1992, the first telephone text message was sent by British engineer Neil Papworth, who transmitted the greeting “Merry Christmas” from his work computer in Newbury, Berkshire, to Vodafone executive Richard Jarvis’ mobile phone.
In 2015, defense Secretary Ash Carter ordered the armed services to open all military jobs to women, removing the final barriers that had kept women from serving in combat, including the most dangerous and grueling commando posts.
In 2017, the second-largest U.S. drugstore chain, CVS, announced that it was buying Aetna, the third-largest health insurer, in order to push much deeper into customer care.
In 2020, Facebook said it would start removing false claims about COVID-19 vaccines.
Ten years ago: The White House rejected a $2.2 trillion proposal by House Republicans to avert the “fiscal cliff,” a plan that included $800 billion in higher tax revenue over 10 years but no increase in tax rates for the wealthy. St. James’s Palace announced that Britain’s Prince William and his wife, Kate, were expecting their first child (Prince George was born the following July).
Five years ago: Former longtime Illinois congressman John Anderson, who ran for president as an independent in 1980, died in Washington at the age of 95.
One year ago: A prosecutor filed involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents of a teen accused of killing four students at a Michigan high school, saying they failed to intervene on the day of the tragedy despite being confronted with a drawing and chilling message — “blood everywhere” — that was found at the boy’s desk. President Joe Biden pledged to make it “very, very difficult” for Russia’s Vladimir Putin to take military action in Ukraine as U.S. intelligence officials determined that Russian planning was underway for a possible military offensive. A judge in Denver ruled that Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, charged with killing 10 people at a Colorado supermarket earlier in the year was mentally incompetent to stand trial and ordered him to be treated at the state mental hospital to see if he could be made well enough to face prosecution.
Today’s Birthdays: Singer Jaye P. Morgan is 91. Actor Nicolas Coster is 89. Rock singer Ozzy Osbourne is 74. Rock singer Mickey Thomas is 73. Country musician Paul Gregg (Restless Heart) is 68. Actor Steven Culp is 67. Actor Daryl Hannah is 62. Actor Julianne Moore is 62. Olympic gold medal figure skater Katarina Witt is 57. Actor Brendan Fraser is 54. Singer Montell Jordan is 54. Actor Royale Watkins is 53. Actor Bruno Campos is 49. Actor Holly Marie Combs is 49. Actor Liza Lapira is 47. Pop-rock singer Daniel Bedingfield is 43. Actor/comedian Tiffany Haddish is 43. Actor Anna Chlumsky (KLUHM’-skee) is 42. Actor Jenna Dewan is 42. Actor Brian Bonsall is 41. Actor Dascha Polanco is 40. Pop/rock singer-songwriter Andy Grammer is 39. Americana musician Michael Calabrese (Lake Street Dive) is 38. Actor Amanda Seyfried is 37. Actor Michael Angarano is 35. Actor Jake T. Austin is 28.
