Mark Waters on Being Excluded From Freaky Friday’s 2025 Sequel

Freaky Friday director Mark Waters had hopes of working on the film’s long-awaited 2025 sequel — but, according to him, never got the opportunity.

“I was not invited to the party,” Waters, 61, claimed in an interview with Variety published on Saturday, August 16. “I did raise my hand and say I’d love to be involved somehow, even in a kind of godfather aspect or executive producer. But I was not extended an invitation.”

The director noted that once he realized that any involvement in Freakier Friday was off the table, he started to focus on other projects.

“It would have been nice to be involved but now that I’m not, I sort of compartmentalize it for myself,” Waters explained. “I need to devote my energy to keep making new, original things that are going to be hits and people can remake them in 20 years.”

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Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis will play mother and daughter once again as the highly-anticipated Freaky Friday sequel is officially in the works. “As I went around the world with Halloween Ends, people wanted to know if there was going to be another Freaky Friday. Something really touched a chord,” Curtis told The New […]

He also claimed that “quite a few” members of the cast reached out to him during filming.

Waters also looked back on the process of landing the director role in the first place — and the issue he had with the original script.

“I got the meeting and I remember going in and kind of feeling like they had a terrible script. I felt it would be really great to get this job, but I can’t go in and tell them this script is good, because I’d be lying,” he said. “The script was about a girl who worked at a school newspaper and wanted to get an interview with Gwen Stefani at the House of Blues. And I said, ‘Why are you doing this? She can’t be some nerd who works with the school paper and the mother’s a nerd who’s a doctor.This is ‘Freaky Friday,’ you have to have the mother and daughter be far apart. She needs to be rock and roll, she should be the lead guitarist in a band playing at the House of Blues and then the mother has to play guitar.’”

Waters ended up working with Lindsay Lohan, who starred in the original Freaky Friday as well as the 2025 sequel alongside Jamie Lee Curtis, in 2004’s Mean Girls. He admitted to Variety that he’d pitched Lohan for the role of Regina King, ultimately played by Rachel McAdams.

“Lindsay’s energy is much more like Regina — I don’t mean that in a negative way, she’s just much more forceful and a really strong personality. I remember reading the Regina scenes with her and she was amazing,” he explained.

Once McAdams was cast, Lohan ended up playing Cady Heron instead. The actress “was a little bummed” because “she thought Regina was more fun,” he admitted.

“But she ended up embracing it,” he said. “And Sherry Lansing pointed out that with Freaky Friday such a big hit, she had to be the lead of the movie. It all worked out for the best.”