Daniel Franzese (Damian) gave Cosmopolitan a charming tell-all about the backstage on-goings at Mean Girls. So many sugary nuggets! During his audition he wooed Tina Fey by describing Amanda Seyfried’s maroon shirt as merlot. When they shot over Halloween, Jonathan Bennett (Aaron Samuels) dressed as Peter Pan. All cute. Shall we skip to what you really want to know — the Mean Girls mean-girls cliques? Sure. Franzese explains:
Amanda was 17 and so was Lindsay. Lindsay and I get along way better now as adults than we did when she was a kid; back then I just felt like, “Oh here’s this kid,” you know? I actually didn’t know who she was — to me, she wasn’t really on the grid yet, except for that whole Aaron Carter thing. I hadn’t seen The Parent Trap or Freaky Friday, I had only heard about them. It wasn’t negative, though. Lizzy Caplan and I really stuck together on that shoot … Definitely Lizzy and I were a clique — there’s no question about that. We were always laughing, always in each other’s trailers, always in each other’s hotel rooms. Inseparable, really. Amanda and Lacey hung out a lot; Lindsay did her own thing. She had a guardian and two young friends with her and they all hung out a lot. Really, it was Lizzy and I rolling solo.
How about Rachel McAdams? She was the same age as you guys, right?
Yeah, it’s funny because Amy Poehler was less than a decade older than Rachel McAdams when she was playing her mom. Rachel’s a really humble person. When we would all go out, Rachel would just stay home. Her agents would come to set and she wouldn’t go to dinner with them, she was just like, “I’m going to chill.” She didn’t want to do interviews, she wasn’t very Hollywood — she was just an actor. And I remember one time a group of us went out shopping in Toronto, we went to go get a drink, and we walked into this bar and Rachel was just there, chilling by herself. She was like, “Oh, I’m having a beer.” Really low-key and normal; a cool, down-to-earth chick.
Not a queen bee but a lone wolf: fascinating.