Mean Girls is one of the best movies of the 2000s, and remains endlessly quotable to this day. Tina Fey's comedy (which is streaming with a Paramount+ subscription) has stood the test of time, and the Mean Girls cast remain synonymous with their roles. That includes Amanda Seyfried, who iconically played Karen Smith to perfection. And she recently spoke to CinemaBlend about the "psychotic" Regina audition that got her the role of Karen.
Regina George is one of the meanest girls in movie history, played to perfection by Rachel McAdams in the 2004 film. As you can see in the video above, I spoke to Seyfried about her role in Paul Feig's The Housemaid, and while talking about the fun of playing movie villains, she revealed her original audition to play Regina. In her words:
My first audition for Mean Girls was a very, pretty psychotic take on Regina, and that's what got me Karen. Because there was that one scene where's she broke her neck by the bus and she's like 'I don't understand why...' It was just like she couldn't, it was just weird.
How wild is that? It's hard to imagine anyone but McAdams playing the role in Mean Girls, but Amanda Seyfried brought something memorable to her audition that eventually landed her the role of Karen Smith. She might not have been right for the primary antagonist of the film, but her work was strong enough that she landed another truly iconic role as the "dumb" girl in the Plastics. And that gig ended up kickstarting the wildly successful career she has now.
The Housemaid trailer showed Seyfried showing off her villainous side, and tormenting Sydney Sweeney's title character. Anticipation is high for the book to screen adaptation, and it seems like she had a great time playing Nina Winchester. Later in our conversation she spoke more about how much she enjoyed playing the villain in her Mean Girls audition, saying:
The whole thing was like psycho. I was like 'Oh, this is the most fun ever.'
Seyfried's performance as Karen is truly iconic, and her dialogue includes some of the Mean Girls lines that are still quoted today. Only time will tell if her role in The Housemaid also finds its place in film history; but the book's popularity is certainly helping to buoy fan excitement about the Paul Feig movie.
Cinephiles are eager to see how Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney interact in The Housemaid, and the ways the film adaptation might be different from the source material. The books are a bonafide trilogy at this point, so it should be interesting to see if a full-blown film franchise is started.
Mean Girls is streaming on Paramount+ and The Housemaid will arrive in heaters on December 19th as part of the 2025 movie release list. For their part, the movie's two stars seem to have killer chemistry (pun intended).
