Is Mean Girls Still Fetch?

With its abundance of queer cast members and sassy quotes, the film is legendary in LGBT+ circles. But will a musical reboot convince today's teens

- Charlotte O'Sullivan

I am about to see the new Mean Girls reboot with a group of giddy, extremely savvy and cine-literate LGBT+ teens. While we’re waiting, the group discusses the original film. Turns out this lot are obsessed. Released in 2004, Tina Fey’s wickedly quotable teen romcom – starring Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams – remains a queer classic. And not only because of the abundance of queer actors in its cast but also the subtext underpinning a number of its characters, storylines and its – duh – subversive wit.

Fey’s script found so many ways to poke fun at prejudice, starting with a to-camera rant from a group of home-schooled Bible-bashers: “And, on the third day, God created the Remington bolt-action rifle so that man could fight the dinosaurs. And the homosexuals. Amen!”

In cinemas this week, the Mean Girls musical (an adaptation of the 2018 Broadway show inspired by the original film) wants to be seen as even more edgy. As in the first movie, the plot centres around Cady Heron (Angourie Rice, stepping into Lohan’s heels), a home-schooled maths nerd raised in Africa who, having been plonked in an American high school, gets caught up in a revenge plot orchestrated by bolshy outsider, Janis (Auli’i Cravalho), and her “too gay to function” best friend, Damian (Jaquel Spivey). The target of the cunning plan is a bodacious, outsider-baiting bully, Regina George (actor and pop star Renee Rapp).