“Can you come wipe me?” a tiny voice asks filmmaker Nisha Ganatra, who is discussing her new movie, Freakier Friday—a sequel to 2003’s Freaky Friday that reunites Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as body-swapping mother Tess and daughter Anna—over Zoom. “Did you hear that?” Ganatra asks with a laugh, shaking her head, then heading out of frame.
“No matter what you think you are, your kid will just bring you back down,” she jokes after returning with her daughter in tow. “You want to say hi, and then you can go back to reading? This is Gigi.” Her six-year-old shyly waves before disappearing again. “I love you,” says Ganatra, before turning her attention back to work.
Meta moments like this are exactly what drew the 51-year-old filmmaker to Freakier Friday. “I really wanted to have fun with Lindsay in this ‘gentle parenting’ movement and the unbelievable expectation that we all have to be perfect. What is the quote I saw? That we’re all expected to mother like we don’t have jobs and work like we don’t have kids,” she tells Vanity Fair. “I really wanted to see her stuck in the middle of that and also show, as a single mom, how your mom steps in to fill the role of your co-parent—and what happens when that gets threatened. It’s weird to say this about Freakier Friday, but it is a very personal film.”
Ganatra thought of this movie as less of a sequel to the Mark Waters–directed original and more of a stand-alone adventure—one that ups the body-swapping stakes with a four-way switch. Lohan’s Anna, a music producer, trades places with teen daughter Harper (Julia Butters). Meanwhile, Curtis’s Tess switches bodies with Anna’s soon-to-be stepdaughter, Lily (Sophia Hammons), whose father is Manny Jacinto’s British chef, Eric.
Unlike its 2003 counterpart, the swap isn’t the work of a fortune cookie message delivered by Chinese restaurant owners Pei-Pei (Rosalind Chao) and her mother (Lucille Soong). Instead, it is Madame Jen, a “multihyphenate lunatic” played by Saturday Night Live alum Vanessa Bayer, who casts the spell. Ganatra previously said that she saw Freakier Friday as an opportunity to correct the “stereotypes” in the last movie that were “hurtful” to the Asian community.
“I don’t know about righting wrongs,” Ganatra tells me when I bring up her previous comments, “because that movie was correct for the time it was in. I don’t think it meant to be harmful in any way. Knowing the [2003] producers, and even talking to Rosalind and Lucille, I know that for a fact. That movie did it exactly the way it worked for that movie, but how can we do this movie in a different way and progress?” In Freakier Friday, the House of Chiang establishment has spawned a “booming culinary empire” for Pei-Pei and her mother, making them far too busy to meddle in the lives of the Colemans—although they do find time to attend Anna’s wedding. “I love that they all got really close from that experience and became family,” Ganatra adds.
Once the switch-up occurs, the teens in adult bodies attempt to pull a reverse Parent Trap, sabotaging their parents’ impending union with some help from Anna’s ex, Jake (a returning, still-Ducati-driving Chad Michael Murray). The adults in teenage bodies, meanwhile, take the opportunity to ride scooters through Downtown Los Angeles and stuff themselves with fast food. “I haven’t had dairy since Bush was president,” quips Tess in Lily’s body.
“Comedies get a lot of flak for not being serious films, but the acting that those four actors are doing is really sophisticated,” says Ganatra. “Then directing it is confusing, because it’s eight different characters with the same four actors.”
Ganatra wanted to avoid outright imitation of Lohan and Curtis, directing the younger actors to mimic a select few physical gestures from their older counterparts. “Jamie likes to talk with her hands a lot, so you’ll notice Sophia moves her hands a lot when she becomes Jamie,” says Ganatra. “Julia Butters did this insane thing where she would switch into doing Lindsay’s exact vocal cadence.”
Then there’s Jacinto, whom Ganatra cast largely based on her love for his performance as lovable dummy Jason on NBC’s The Good Place. “It’s so tricky what Manny pulls off, because he has to not be so out of it that he doesn’t realize something’s off—but he has to not blow up the whole movie,” she explains. “We kind of landed on [the idea] that he has to be so in love with Anna that he’s willing to overlook all these things or write them off as quirks, the way we do with red flags in a relationship.”
It all leads to an electrifying final sequence at The Wiltern in Los Angeles, where a pop star whom Anna manages (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) has a concert that must catapult all the main characters back into their original bodies. “The best choice I made was the music,” says Ganatra. “It’s Suzy Shinn, an incredible music producer and one of my inspirations for The High Note, and Sarah Aarons who wrote all the music.” Their work includes “Baby,” a moving track that Anna writes about, then performs alongside, her daughter, Harper. “The minute I heard it, it felt like a hit song that I’ve always loved and wanted to hear for the rest of my life,” says Ganatra.
The mother-daughter duet helps facilitate the switchback. With that sorted, Lohan and her old band, Pink Slip—including Christina Vidal Mitchell and Haley Hudson—can celebrate by performing “Take Me Away,” a song from the 2003 Freaky Friday. There are several nods to that film in their performance, including a bit of crowd-surfing—“which always happens at book signings,” Ganatra jokes.
Unlike other long-awaited legacy sequels, such as Hocus Pocus 2 and Disenchanted, Freakier Friday premiered in theaters rather than solely on streaming—earning nearly $45 million in its opening weekend and having the biggest-ever August debut for a PG-rated movie. “I love movies so much because they’re a communal experience,” she says. “I will always go see a comedy in a theater rather than at home. Laughing in a theater with friends and strangers is what brings us closer together.”
But Ganatra, who has directed episodes of Girls, And Just Like That…, and Deli Boys since making her feature debut with 1999’s Chutney Popcorn, is perhaps most excited about a relatively simple scene featuring Lohan and Curtis on a beach. “It wasn’t scripted. It was nowhere on the schedule…. I just had this feeling that I needed to see the two of them in the water together,” says Ganatra. “Jamie put on this wetsuit. They held hands, went in the water. Lindsay taught her how to jump over the waves. It’s a brief flash of Lindsay just full of joy, laughing, because Jamie’s messing around in the ocean…. I had all the feels. Like, whoa, this is not just Anna and Tess—this is Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis connecting in a place they both love.”
An argument between Anna and Harper immediately follows the scene. “We all lose our shit on our moms, and then we all feel so bad after,” says Ganatra. “I wanted to have the reality of that in there, not just have this picture-perfect mother-daughter movie.”
Scenes like these reminded Ganatra of how much has changed in the 20-plus years since the last movie’s release. “You grew up wanting to be Lindsay Lohan, thinking you are Lindsay Lohan,” she begins. “Then transforming into adulthood is a slow realization that you are not, in fact, Lindsay Lohan. Coming to terms with that is just brutal. Then you meet Jamie Lee Curtis, and you’re like, Ooh, but I can be Jamie Lee Curtis one day.” It’s all a part of “trying to not be the parent your mom was, only to find out that your mom was a pretty good parent after all,” Ganatra says. “The wish fulfillment of Freakier Friday is that those late realizations happen sooner.”
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