Cosmo rewind
To create the iconic Pink Slip in Freaky Friday, she rehearsed three times a week. But it almost didn’t happen. On its 20th(!) anniversary, the cast and crew detail how the generation-defining film got made
Is it just us, or is the foundational text that is Freaky Friday – and more importantly, Pink Slip, the pop-rock band at its centre – suddenly everywhere again? TikTok has turned into one big Pink Slip mood board: the tartan trousers, the grommet belts, the chunky hair highlights. Major artists such as Olivia Rodrigo blatantly channel Pink Slip’s teenage angst; indie musicians Muna even covered one of their songs at a show last year.
Honestly, it’s not hard to see why. The songs – moody but upbeat numbers such as Take Me Away and Ultimate (sung and recorded by Lindsay Lohan and fellow actors Christina Vidal and Haley Hudson) – perfectly captured what it felt like to be a teenager with a lot of feelings in the early 2000s. They also still feel shockingly relevant, especially for a generation that’s long since moved into adulthood and very much gets the struggle of doing the ‘same old stuff ’ every single day.
Plus, the band, more than any other part of the movie, pretty much launched Lindsay into our hearts and minds. Sure, she’d already played a precocious set of twins in The Parent Trap, endearing herself to little-kid fans. But as Freaky Friday’s Anna Coleman, she became the cool older sister to those same fans – and a hyper-relatable star to an entire generation of women dealing with their own adolescent rage. Now, Lindsay is suddenly everywhere you look again, too (including *cough cough humble brag* on the cover of this very magazine just a few issues ago), bringing this whole thing full circle.
So, yeah, why wouldn’t we dive back into this seminal moment in pop-culture history, via interviews with many of Freaky Friday’s cast and crew? (All conducted before the Sag-Aftra and WGA strikes started.) Please enjoy this wild 20th-anniversary ride through the surprisingly juicy makings of a classic, while belting out the lyrics to Take Me Away at the top of your lungs in as nasal a voice as possible.
Before anyone could step into the recording studio, the producers had to find an Anna. It had to be someone who could both act and sing – the rest of the cast hinged on it. Lindsay auditioned in 2002 and... almost didn’t get the part.
MARCI LIROFF (CASTING DIRECTOR): I kept bringing her up, but I remember everyone in the room said no to Lindsay because Disney had already made The Parent Trap with her. We saw Mischa Barton, Kristen Stewart, Mae Whitman, Evan Rachel Wood, Brie Larson, Emmy Rossum, Kristen Bell, Shiri Appleby and Danielle Panabaker.
HEATHER HACH (SCREENWRITER): I
