Amanda Seyfried has shocked us with new Mean Girls trivia, just when you thought you’d heard it all.
Blake Lively came very close to playing Karen Smith, the lovably stupid member of the Plastics clique with Gretchen Wieners, Cady Heron, and Queen Bee Regina George, according to the 37-year-old.
We all got to know and adore Seyfried in the role, which she played with Lacey Chabert, Lindsay Lohan, and Rachel McAdams, but things could have gone very differently.
‘I’d flown out to LA for the first time with my mother. It was very exciting,’ Seyfried, who is currently working on a Thema & Louise musical, recalled.
‘I met Lacey Chabert for the first time and Lindsay Lohan was in the room and Blake Lively was playing Karen, and then I was Regina.
‘I flew home and they were like… “We think you’re more correct for Karen.” So I was like, “Oh god, OK, sure,”’ the Dropout star told Vanity Fair.
Seyfried also described how, ahead of her audition, she worked with a humorous director to perfect the classic ‘whispery’ Karen accent, which was influenced by Marilyn Monroe.
Happily, it all paid off, with McAdams stepping in to play the ideal Plastics leader as Regina, and Lively going on to do rather well for herself on a programme called Gossip Girl.
Before she received her big break on The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Mean Girls casting director Marci Liroff told Cosmopolitan UK that Lively was a top option for the role of Karen.
‘She came down to the final tests but, at some point, some of the filmmakers said to keep looking,’ Liroff said.
‘Amanda Seyfried had read for Regina, and we really liked her, but then [producer] Lorne [Michaels] suggested, “Why don’t we make her Karen?”’
‘I think the reason we love Karen so much — and also why she’s so funny — is because she’s just being brutally honest, and it’s so lovely, and it’s what makes her so lovable,’ Seyfried told Vanity Fair of her (eventual) character’s appeal.
The star also cited the fact that ‘she’s not that smart, but she totally knows it’ and always gives a ‘true reaction’.
‘And I think we all love people like that because we can trust them.’
Lively is believed to have just given birth to her fourth child with husband Ryan Reynolds after uploading a picture of herself, Reynolds, and his mother Tammy on Instagram ahead of the Super Bowl, where she no longer had a bump and noted she had ‘been busy.’
Supporters jumped to the conclusion that the couple had given birth, despite the fact that no statement had been made.
They already have three daughters: James, eight, Inez, six, and Betty, three.