Bebe Wood and Avantika Vandanapu Reinvent the Plastics in ‘Mean Girls’

Mean Girls is a musical adaptation of the iconic 2004 movie which became a hit Broadway musical in 2018. Now, twenty years after Mean Girls premiered, the movie musical has arrived on the big screen. We spoke with Bebe Wood and Avantika Vandanapu (who play Gretchen and Karen, respectively) about updating the Plastics for a modern audience while capturing the magic of the original film.

Mean Girls features small changes in Karen and Gretchen’s friendship with Regina that help their co-dependent relationship make more sense. For example, Karen is no longer being made fun of for her intelligence by her friends.

“The fact that she’s not ostracized in this group, because I think everybody in this group so clearly has certain weaknesses and certain flaws and not commentating on like someone’s intelligence level, especially when you’re their friend, is a really delicate matter that I think was really sweet amongst the Plastics, the mean girls for not like drawing attention to that about Karen [played by Amanda Seyfried in the 2004 film],” Vandanapu (Spin, Never Have I Ever) said. “I think she has a little bit more agency in how she portrays herself. And I think because she’s not ostracized for how smart she is, she is a little stupider in this version I feel like. But I love that about her. She’s sweeter, she’s a little more naive. I think within the rivalry and within the dynamics of this, it’s just really wonderful that she’s kind of retained this truth about herself and whether people like it or not. So this is who she is. She’s innocent and sweet and pure and she says what she thinks and she may not be thinking much at any given moment in time, but she definitely says it and she’s unfiltered.”

The character of Gretchen (played by Lacey Chabert in the original film) also undergoes her own changes in the new film. Bebe Wood (Love, Victor) loses the iconic speech about Julius Caesar, but she still tries to make “fetch” happen. Wood was able to make this version of Gretchen completely hers. “Obviously Gretchen is such an iconic character. I was such a fan of the original movie, so it was super exciting to take on this challenge,” Wood said. “I’m happy I got to say ‘That’s so fetch’ and ‘You can’t sit with us,’ like we still had these like amazing iconic moments, but it was really exciting to also recognize and kind of mark the lines that feel kind of iconic but very much our own that haven’t been said yet. It was so exciting to say those lines that we all know and love. But it was really cool as well that Tina [Fey] was kind of throwing lines our way that felt really iconic that we could kind of make our own and establish in our version. It’s our character’s sort of iconic lines and moments moving forward, it was really, really cool.”

We talked about bringing the musical from the stage of the August Wilson Theater in New York (which reminds me of an Olive Garden) to the realistic high school set they were able to create in the film.

“We were filming in an abandoned Catholic Catholic school, so that already was very method, living in, in the high school,” she said. “But then also when you’re doing crazy awesome really big colorful numbers like ‘Revenge Party’ or walking around like where am I? What is happening? It’s such a cool immersive experience to obviously be walking around within it and living it, but I think it’s also a testament to Tina and our directors and our camera crew that they kind of made that really immersive environment feel I think like equally as immersive in the theater. When I was watching it back, I was like, ‘My god, this kind of feels exactly the same. It felt like I was like reliving it.”

And for Vandanapu, it made the experience that much more special. “It was for sure a wild experience to be right in the middle, in the thick of it, I think is an irreplaceable experience. I think we were all in awe all the time of everything that was going around us and I think you can really tell in the film how much we love and adore and appreciate that environment and the people that we got to work with.”

Mean Girls is in theaters now.

(featured image: Jojo Whilden/Paramount Pictures)