For ‘Mean Girls’ star, Mass. is ‘home base’
Bebe Wood opens up about updating the comedy for GenZ
When the original “Mean Girls” movie first hit the big screen, Bebe Wood was just a toddler growing up in Kansas City, Mo., too young to grasp the film’s pop-culture impact.
As the years went on, though, the fan-favorite comedy would grow into a “huge part” of her life, as it did for many of the fellow Gen Z cast members of the new musical movie now in theaters. The film adapts the hit “Mean Girls” Broadway musical, which is based on the 2004 film, which itself is an adaptation of the book “Queen Bees and Wannabes” by author Rosalind Wiseman.
“We were little toddlers when ‘Mean Girls’ came out, and we can’t really imagine a life without ‘Mean Girls,’” Wood told the Globe during an interview in Cambridge Thursday.
Wood can’t imagine life without acting either. She landed her first broadcast TV gig as a teen in a 2012 episode of comedian Tina Fey’s “30 Rock.” Wood and Fey reunite in the new “Mean Girls” movie, with the former “Saturday Night Live” star reprising her role as Ms. Norbury. (Fey also wrote the screenplay for the 2004 film and the book for the Broadway adaptation.)
Wood moved to Boston after her parents shipped up to the area a few years ago. The actress lived in the Seaport for a while and still comes back to the Bay State frequently.
Though Kansas City will always be home, “Massachusetts is my home base,” Wood said, adding that she would also “consider Massachusetts home now.”
The new “Mean Girls” movie retains the same familiar plot points of the original, with Angourie Rice taking over for Lindsay Lohan as new girl in town, Cady Heron, who struggles to find her way in high school. Cady gets swept up by the allure of the popular Plastics clique, led by queen bee Regina George (played here by singer Reneé Rapp) and her minions Karen Shetty (Avantika) and Gretchen Wieners (Wood).
The 2004 film featured Lacey Chabert in the iconically “fetch” role of Gretchen, a performance that Wood calls “untouchable.” While Wood didn’t get a chance to meet “Gretchens of Christmas past” Chabert and Ashley Park, who played the character on Broadway and has a cameo in the film, the actress made sure to honor their work with her take on the character while also making it her own.
“I used Tina’s dialogue really as the blueprint, because the essence of Gretchen is so strong within the words she chooses to say,” Wood explained. “Then I trusted that, by virtue of my being a different performer, my performance would be different.”
Wood added that she didn’t want to “overthink” it.
“Ultimately, we just love the original,” Wood said. “It’s an honor to be a part of this reimagining of it.”
While taking on an iconic role was daunting, starring in a movie musical has always been on Wood’s “bucket list,” she said, and performing on the stage has been her dream since childhood.
“My intention was to remain a musical-theater performer forever,” Wood said, adding that, as a kid, “I was like, ‘I’m only going to act on stage,’ and then of course I fell in love with film.”
Wood, who is also a singer-songwriter, notes that, while the original film uses voice-overs as a “helpful filmmaking tool” to reveal the inner thoughts of Cady and her friends, the new “Mean Girls” leverages music to expand their stories.
“Each song is really just a window into these characters’ heads, their imaginations, these inner worlds and inner lives that they live,” Wood said.
The new film updates the portrayal of high school for Gen Z audiences. Fans of the 2004 flick will notice that the 2024 musical adaptation drops some of its more controversial plot points and dialogue that would be construed as racist or misogynistic today.
As an older member of Gen Z who can remember the era of “flip phones and ‘Legends of the Hidden Temple,’” Wood believes the biggest difference between how the current generation and millennials grew up is that, today, “everything online feels really real.”
Wood praises the new “Mean Girls” for being “so current and an honest representation of who we are as young people.”
And while fans were still trying to make “fetch” happen in 2004 (a word Wood defines as being “so great and so good that it’s like beyond humanity”), the “Mean Girls” star is adamant that the word has finally arrived.
“If the conversation is, like, ‘how do we make fetch happen?’ for the last 20 years, then it’s definitely happened, right?” Wood said. “If we keep talking about it, even if people aren’t saying it all the time, then it’s definitely happened.”