So fetch!

What to expect from a musical reimagining of the pink-coated coming-of-age story

- STEVEN PERKINS

MEAN GIRLS

FROM TUESDAY 16 JULY, PARAMOUNT+ COMEDY

One of cinema’s iconic battles for high-school supremacy gets an all-singing, all-dancing makeover in glossy comedy movie Mean Girls, which arrives on Paramount+ this week following its big-screen release earlier this year.

Based on American actor and comedian Tina Fey’s 2004 film of the same name starring Lindsay Lohan, which inspired a Broadway musical in 2018, the cautionary tale sees Mare of Easttown’s Angourie Rice play 16-year-old Cady Heron, who’s moved back to the States from Kenya, where she was homeschooled by her anthropologist mother (Jenna Fischer, star of the US version of The Office).

On her first day at her new school, Cady tries to navigate the various cliques. Encouraged by her new friends, social outcasts J (Moana’s Auli‘i Cravalho) and Damian Hubbard (theatre star Jaquel Spivey), she is soon infiltrating an A-list group of popular, ‘mean’ girls, known as The Plastics, who live by a unique set of sartorial rules such as having to wear pink on Wednesdays.

But when Cady makes the mistake of falling for alpha Plastic Regina George’s ex Aaron Samuels (The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Christopher Briney), it sparks a chain of events that result in Cady being crowned new queen bee. Will her new-found status lead to her becoming a ‘mean girl’ herself?

Here, the cast and crew tell us why this reimagining is set to be a showstopper…

MUSICAL TWIST