Anna has a 14-year-old “tomboy” daughter, Harper, who doesn’t like her mom’s British restauranteur lover, according to audition sides obtained by EW.
New potential plot details for Disney’s highly anticipated sequel Freaky Friday 2 reveal that an adult version of Lindsay Lohan’s character, Anna Coleman, might be a bit of a fun-sucker herself as she and her mother, Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis) switch lives not with each other this time, but with two teenage girls.
Days after news broke that Late Night director Nisha Ganatra would reunite Curtis and Lohan for the follow-up to 2003’s Freaky Friday , the filmmaker shared to her Instagram Story an open casting call to fill the new role of Anna’s 14-year-old daughter, Harper.
The call, shared over the weekend, describes Harper as “a tomboy with a sharp sense of humor” who’s “in a bit of a mood these days because her longtime single mom is set to marry British restaurateur Eric Davis,” according to the description.
According to the description, Eric also has a 14-year-old daughter, Lily, who does “not see eye to eye” with Harper — even as their families are about to join together via marriage.
Entertainment Weekly viewed the audition sides (including eight script pages) sent to prospective stars, which state “this is a ‘body swap’ scene,” and that “Harper should channel ‘Anna’ (Lindsay Lohan) and Lily should channel ‘Tess’ (Jamie Lee Curtis).”
Additional character details for Harper posted in the casting call include a note that she “would like to see things go her way and use her intelligence to stop this marriage from ever happening,” and stresses that the performance behind Harper “should be grounded, emotional, and as natural as possible.”
Other pages sent as part of the audition include a scene where body-swapped Harper and Lily (really Anna and Tess) participate in a beach cleanup as part of school detention in which Tess (as Lily) voices concerns that Anna is set to move away from her to London to be with her new husband.
Other scenes in the audition script include the pair in their teenage form sitting in a kitchen sipping apple juice from wine glasses and Anna-as-Harper revealing that she fears she’s lost touch with her teenage self, who memorably fronted a rock band in the first film.
EW can not confirm that the script sides from the audition are part of the official script. EW has reached out to Disney for comment.
On Friday, EW confirmed that Ganatra had boarded the long-gestating project after The Hollywood Reporter broke the news, which dropped hours after Curtis shared to Instagram a photo of an in-person reunion with Lohan.
Curtis, who won her first Oscar for her role in 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, has long spoken about her desire to re-team with Lohan for a Freaky Friday sequel. She even told EW last year during an interview for Haunted Mansion that the WGA strikes impacted script development, but that she hoped things would get back on track soon.
“Oh, it’ll happen. For sure. Oh, for sure. There’s no question,” Curtis said at the time.
“Yes, except stories require writers, and right now there are no writers because they’re all fighting for their lives, for their creative lives, for their emotional lives, and for their financial lives,” she explained. “We’re in the middle of a contract dispute. And so, until those writers get paid correctly and protected by the producers that make billions off of them, we will not be able to tell you any more about the Freaky Friday sequel, except that it is happening.”
Director Mark Waters’ Freaky Friday movie — about a supernatural force that leads to a mother-daughter duo’s spirits to swap into each other’s bodies — became a global hit at the box office, grossing over $160 million before building a further audience with subsequent airings on the Disney Channel throughout the decade.
The original Freaky Friday premiered in 1976 starring Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster as the mother and daughter who switch bodies. The movie was also remade in 1995 with Shelley Long and Gaby Hoffman, as well as in 2018 with Heidi Blickenstaff and Cozi Zuehlsdorff.