'Parent Trap' reunion! Lindsay Lohan explains Elaine Hendrix's 'Freakier Friday' cameo
Elaine Hendrix has long proclaimed that her character in “The Parent Trap” is not the villain of the 1998 movie, and now Lindsay Lohan is weighing in.
Lohan, 39, played dual roles in Disney’s remake, starring as twins Hallie and Annie, who were separated when their parents, Nick Parker (Dennis Quaid) and Elizabeth James (Natasha Richardson), divorced. Elizabeth raised Annie in London, while Hallie had her run of Nick’s vineyard in Napa.
A chance meeting at summer camp reunited the twins, and they switched places in hopes of bringing their parents back together. But the duo ran into a little problem when they learned that Nick was engaged to Meredith Blake (Hendrix), a 26-year-old PR powerhouse. Sure, she might be eyeing Nick’s bank account and unknowingly standing in the way of true love, but as Meredith says in the movie, “Being young and beautiful is not a crime, you know.”
Lohan and Hendrix reunite in “Freakier Friday” (in theaters now), a sequel to the 2003 film in which angsty teenager Anna (Lohan) switched bodies with her psychologist mom Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis). In the second installment, Anna has shelved her dreams of becoming a rock star in order to be a devoted mom to her teenage daughter Harper (Julia Butters) and now manages a rising pop artist, Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). Thanks to a fortune teller (Vanessa Bayer), Anna swaps with Harper and Tess trades places with Harper’s school nemesis and soon-to-be stepsister Lily (Sophia Hammons).
Hendrix, 54, appears briefly as Anna’s colleague Blake Kale, who assists at a photoshoot for Ella’s album. Lohan tells Paste BN that she and “Freakier Friday” director Nisha Ganatra are both friends with Hendrix, which is how the cameo came to be.
“When it was mentioned, ‘Should we have Elaine do a little cameo?’ We were like, ‘Yeah, why not? Let's do it! Let's get Elaine in here,’ ” Lohan says. ”Because she's so awesome and she's amazing.”
Lohan says she felt like the clock had turned back two decades.
“When we were shooting, I kept laughing because she says this line, something puss, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God. That's like a ‘Parent Trap’ line,” Lohan says. “I felt like I was 10 again.” (In “The Parent Trap,“ Meredith tells one of the twins, “OK, puss, you listen and you listen good. I am marrying your father in two weeks, whether you like it or not.”)
Is Meredith the villain in 'The Parent Trap'?
In 2022, Hendrix leaned into the “He’s a 10 but …” trend and took the opportunity to roast Nick in a TikTok set to Adele’s “Easy on Me.”
She revisited the movie’s plot with a video snippet of Hendrix pouring herself a tall glass of red wine.
A voiceover says Meredith, Nick and the twins, “go on a camping trip to get to know one another, but you’re not a nature girl and the twins know it. So the little brats put rocks in your backpack, a lizard on your head, sugar water in your mosquito repellent, and push your air mattress into the lake while you’re sleeping.”
So you lose it, the text reads, “threaten to ship them to Switzerland (for boarding school) and throw a ring at his head. And you’ve never looked back.”
“She's a bit of a villain in that movie,” Lohan says. “But she's also just a beautiful blonde bombshell who falls in love with a man, and it's his fault too.”
“I think if you asked Hallie and Annie, they'd probably still say that she was the villain,” Lohan adds with a laugh. “Or I don't know what they’d feel today! Maybe we'll see.”