Twenty-two years ago, the world was given the gift of Freaky Friday.
The hit 2003 film starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan made a whopping $160.8 million at the box office – a giant feat for a teen comedy – and now, more than two decades later, the highly-anticipated sequel is about to hit cinemas.
A large part of the franchise’s success lies in the undeniable chemistry between Curtis and Lohan, but what if we told you Curtis’ role was originally meant for another actor?
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Speaking with 9honey Celebrity, Curtis says it was only a few days before filming began that she was contacted to be a part of the film.
“Another actress was doing the movie and she pulled out, I think, for personal reasons. I really never found out [why], and I had, like, four days before we started to work,” she says.
It was American Beauty star Annette Bening who was originally meant to play Tess Coleman, and while most actors would be hesitant to take on a role with such short notice, Curtis says she wasn’t too fazed.
But she did have one concern.
“I had no hesitation to do that. The only hesitation was I had a 15-year-old and a five-year-old at home,” she explains.
“So just the idea of jumping into a movie where all of a sudden I was going to go to work for three months on something, and just the management of my family life, was the only issue for me.”
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Jamie Lee Curtis almost missed out on Freaky Friday role
Thankfully, in Curtis’ own words, “the movie turned out to be a humongous hit”.
“[It] really changed my career in many ways, so of course I’m grateful,” she adds.
Now, 22 years later, the Oscar winner has reunited with Lohan for the long-awaited sequel.
The idea came about in 2022 when Curtis was in Australia for the Halloween Ends press tour.
The actress has said she was asked over and over whether she would ever make a Freaky Friday sequel, always responding that it could only happen once Lohan was old enough to have a child of her own.
Eventually, a journalist pointed out to Curtis that Lohan was now in her mid-30s.
So, Curtis made the call to Disney CEO Bob Iger and Lohan, who was in Ireland at the time shooting Irish Wish, and the Freaky Friday sequel became more than a dream for fans – it became Freakier Friday.
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Over the years, Lohan and Curtis have remained close friends, with Lohan often saying Curtis is someone she truly admires as both an actor and friend.
“The truth is I’ve known her a long time. I knew her when she was 15 years old,” Curtis says of her co-star.
She recalls a clip she had found earlier in the day – which she’s since “posted on the Instagram” – of her and Lindsay “clowning around” on the set of the original film.
”I realised that’s who I have always known, that playful young woman,” Curtis says.
“Over the course of these 22 years, she’s become a woman and obviously has developed very much her own mind and her own choices, and she moved to Dubai and, obviously found love, has a beautiful little boy.”
Freakier Friday director Nisha Gunatra told Entertainmet Weekly the pair bring out “a joyfulness” in each other, which Curtis says all comes down to their mutual love and trust.
”I think the joy that you see, or that Nisha saw, is really just a friendship that we’ve had for a long time that’s been reunited,” she says.
“But the truth is, we really do care about each other.”
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Watching the film, it’s clear the pair had the time of their lives on set, with Curtis and Lohan’s joy basically radiating through the screen.
But they aren’t the only two cast members to make a grand return in the sequel – 2000s heartthrob Chad Michael Murray also plays a role in bringing the story back to the screen.
The first scene that unites the trio is one of the highlights of the film, with Curtis recalling it wasn’t an easy one to shoot.
“It was fun,” she chuckles.
In the scene in question, Curtis crawls around on the floor of a record store while Lohan climbs onto a table and starts manically flicking her hair around while Murray simply has to stand and watch.
“It was funny,” Curtis recalls of shooting the scene.
“There was a lot of laughing.”
While the movie is a light-hearted, feel good comedy, it’s not without deeper messages. Curtis says she hopes fans walk out of the cinema with just a little more empathy for the experience of one another.
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“The world feels very … in short supply of empathy,” she says.
“A movie should give you a chance to kind of enter this dark space, sit and then share with other people the feeling of laughter and emotion.
“And I hope at the end of the day, it can give you a tiny bit of shift into understanding that judgment of other people is really just a wall between you and [them], and that we need to take them down, not build them.”
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