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An Alternate Aaron
While it was Jonathan Bennett who was lucky enough to ask Lindsay Lohan what day it was–October 3!–there were a few other contenders for the Aaron Samuels role. In a 2014 interview with Cosmopolitan, actor Daniel Franzese (who played Damian) revealed that the role originally belonged to a recognizable actor who got himself fired at the table read. “This other actor hadn’t shaved and he didn’t take his hat off; he was playing it really cool,” Daniel said, afraid to ID the actor and embarrass him. “People kept coming over to him like, ‘You know, you should really take your hat off.’ And then, right after the table read, he got fired and they called Jonathan Bennett, who I guess was their second choice.”
And that’s not all Daniel spilled. “Also, Lindsay recently told me that, even before [the actor who got fired], James Franco was considered for the role of Aaron Samuels,” he added. “I thought that was so cool — Bennett was great but that would’ve been cool.”
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The Fallon Connection
While Jonathan Bennett may not have been the first choice for Aaron, the actor contends that he got the gig because he bore a striking resemblance to Tina Fey’s former Weekend Update co-anchor Jimmy Fallon. “She said that’s exactly 100 percent true,” he told Huffington Post in 2015.
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Tina’s Math Troubles
Aside from writing the movie’s killer script, Tina Fey also starred in Mean Girls as math teacher and Mathletes advisor Ms. Norbury. But as Tina told it, when it came to the math jargon she scripted for herself to say, she had no idea what she was talking about. “It was an attempt on my part to counteract the stereotype that girls can’t do math. Even though I did not understand a word I was saying,” she told the NYT back in 2004 before revealing exactly how she made those moments in the script make sense. “My friend’s boyfriend is a calculus teacher in the Bronx. I took his lesson plans.
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The Real Glen Cocco
As Fey explained to Entertainment Weekly in 2014, “I tried to use real names in writing because it’s just easier.” Case in point? The addressed-but-hardly seen Glen Cocco, named after her older brother’s good friend. “He’s a film editor in Los Angeles, and I imagine it’s a pain in the butt for him,” she explained to the publication. “Someone said to me you could buy a shirt at Target that says ‘You go, Glenn Cocco!’ That was unexpected.”
Other characters named after real people? Lizzy Caplan‘s Janis Ian, named after the musician who was one of the earliest musical guests on SNL, and Damian, named after Fey’s high school BFF–and current TV Guide writer–Damian Holbrook. Cady, meanwhile, was named after Fey’s college roommate Cady Garey.
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The Source Material
Mean Girls is famously based on Rosalind Wiseman‘s parenting book Queen Bees and Wannabees: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, and Other Realities of Adolescence, and, since it has no fictional narrative to adapt, Fey was free to draw from her own high school experiences to create a plot from scratch while staying true to what Wiseman had to say in her book. And the author has remained enthusiastic about Fey’s interpretation of her work, except for one minor thing. “I do not do trust falls, I have never done trust falls, I will never do trust falls,” she told The Atlantic in 2014. “I just remember when I saw it the first time being like, ‘Tina, I do not do that.'”
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How to Get a Dog to Bite
Remember that scene where Amy Poehler’s Mrs. George is holding her dog, oblivious to the fact that it’s gnawing on her breast implant? Here’s how they accomplished that. “They, like, pinned a piece of a cocktail wiener into her bra,” Rachel McAdams told EW. “I thought this dog was going to tear her apart. It was very effective. She was such a pro through it. She’s trying to do her lines and being so professional, and this dog is chomping on her fake boob. I’ll never forget that.”
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Damian’s Deleted Scene
According to Daniel Franzese, the original script contained a scene for Damian at the end that wound up being removed before it could be filmed. “The original ending shows what happened to Damian after [junior year], and he was going to audition for American Idol. Simon Cowell was going to call him chubby and then he was going to run up on the stage and punch him,” he told Cosmo. As the actor told the magazine, there were a lot of revisions to the original ending, including a bit where Ms. Norbury busts Kevin G for selling ecstasy, so when she’s investigated for being a drug pusher, there are actual drugs in her desk.
“Janis and Damian convince Kevin G. to go to the school board when they discuss her punishment to confess that it was him, but Kevin G never shows up,” he continued. “So Damian gets on the podium and kind of bulls–ts his way through saying it was him to try to protect Miss Norbury.”
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What Could’ve Been
Fey famously never considered writing a sequel to the hit film, a decision she’s gone on record as regretting now. “At the time we did want to start the conversation about the sequel, and for whatever reason I was like, ‘No!!! We shouldn’t do that!'” she told EW in 2014. “Now I look back and I’m like, ‘Why?’ But now, no—it’s too late now.” As she told Variety in 2018, however, “Maybe it’s better, because we can save all the energy for this.” This being the Mean Girls musical she wrote with husband and 30 Rock composer Jeff Richmond that premiered in Washington D.C in 2017 before opening on Broadway in April 2018. Nominated for 12 Tony Awards and nine Drama Desk Awards that year, Fey won Outstanding Book of a Musical at the latter.
And while there’s been no sequel ever made, there has been a film producing bearing the moniker Mean Girls 2. The made-for-TV “sequel” aired on ABC Family (now Freeform) in 2011 and was a stand-alone story that had nothing to do with the original film aside from having Tim Meadows reprise his role as the school’s principal. It was not well-received.
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