This is what we learned from members of the film’s most underrated clique.
Since Mean Girls was released in 2004, the movie has left a huge footprint on pop culture.
Words like “grool” and “fetch” are now forever a part of our lexicon. And there’s also Mean Girls Day, the unofficial holiday seemingly made for the internet, during which people unabashedly obsess over all things associated with the movie.
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It may seem that everything there is to know about Mean Girls has been unearthed, but BuzzFeed News chatted with Alisha Morrison and Nate Bucknor — two of the actors who made up the iconic clique of “Unfriendly Black Hotties” — about life on set and what they’re doing now.
Unfortunately, Morrison and Bucknor were the only members of the Unfriendly Black Hotties who’ve remained in contact with one another. The other hotties were uncredited and, despite our best efforts, we weren’t able to find them.
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Alisha Morrison, the only Unfriendly Black Hottie who’s credited in the film (as Lea Edwards), originally auditioned to play Gretchen Wieners.
“I went on two callbacks, and I guess they liked me enough that they wanted to give me some sort of part,” Morrison told BuzzFeed News. She said she found out during one of her final auditions that producers wanted to “go a different route” — Lacey Chabert ended up nabbing the role.
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Morrison worked in a movie theater when Mean Girls came out and people would “lose their minds” when they saw her.
Back in 2004, Morrison worked a part-time job at a movie theater, and things got a little crazy when people trickled in to see Mean Girls and were greeted by her. “I would be selling people tickets to go see it and they would come back down afterward and lose their minds,” Morrison said. “And it had gotten to the point where my manager had to move me to a different position in the internal office just to get me away from the customers because it was creating such a frenzy.”
Courtesy of Alisha Morrison
Fans of the movie still come up to Morrison and ask her to reenact iconic scenes with them.
“The amount of times I have been referred to as the girl with the ugly skirt, I’m just like, ‘C’mon guys, there’s more to my character than the ugly skirt,'” Morrison said. “I just think it’s hilarious because most people want to do the scene with me and want to reenact the scene and I’m like, ‘Okay, well, let’s do it.’ It’s just fun to see how excited people get because, let’s be honest, it was over a decade ago that I filmed this.”
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Lohan kept laughing during the lunch scene where the Unfriendly Black Hotties are introduced because of the faces the hotties kept making.
“Every time we’d give Lindsay a look, she’d break out in laughter,” Bucknor told BuzzFeed News of the memorable scene, which took about 45 minutes to an hour to film. He also said Lohan really loved the word “Jambo,” which made her crack up when she went up to the hotties and delivered the line. (As fans of the movie know by now, “Jambo” means “Hello” in Swahili.)
Courtesy of Alisha Morrison
Morrison was initially not so keen about the term “Unfriendly Black Hotties,” though she’s definitely warmed up to it in the years since.
“I can’t lie. In the beginning, I wasn’t too fond of that term because there’s a lot more to the group,” Morrison said. “But you gotta keep it real— there’s a lot of stereotypes in high school, so I sucked it up.” She noted that she loves how the phrase has become “such an empowered term today,” especially on social media — just look through the hundreds of #UnfriendlyBlackHotties tagged on Instagram.
Courtesy of Alisha Morrison
From a representation standpoint, Bucknor thinks having the Unfriendly Black Hotties in the film was a positive thing.
“That really shined a light on us, specifically,” Bucknor said. “I mean, if you take a look at the movie — other than the six of us — there wasn’t many after us. You didn’t really see any other black actors in that movie. For us to have that platform and really stand out in that film was really nice.”
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Morrison said she and Lohan bonded over being some of the youngest cast members.
“We were actually the only girls on set that were the same age,” Morrison said. “A lot of the other cast were a lot older than us. She was really, really nice and welcoming to me. We were both being tutored on set and we would hang out during the day and there was one point where she wanted to do my makeup on set. You don’t really get that camaraderie on adult sets as much, so it was nice having someone that big be that down-to-earth with me.”
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And Rachel McAdams was “by far the nicest person on set,” Bucknor said.
Bucknor recalled getting lunch with McAdams and seeing her sign autographs all the time, but the moment that stood out most to him was on the last day of filming, which happened to be the Halloween party scene. Bucknor said McAdams stepped away from shooting to take photos with him after he’d lost the ones he’d snapped when they’d gotten lunch. “I felt really good that she had took her time out of shooting to come take more photos with me,” he said.
Morrison reiterated that McAdams was “so unbelievably professional, so kind, so down-to-earth.”
“I said to myself, ‘If I ever make it in this industry and I become as famous as her, I want to be exactly like she is,'” she said. “That’s someone you want to respect and look up to.”
Courtesy of Alisha Morrison