Amanda Seyfried has revealed Blake Lively almost played her Mean Girls character Karen.

The Mamma Mia! star, who portrayed Karen Smith in the 2004 teen classic, shared in a career retrospective video for Vanity Fair that she auditioned for the role of queen bee Regina George alongside Lively as Karen, Lindsay Lohan as Cady Heron, and Lacey Chabert as Gretchen Wieners.

“I’d flown out to L.A. for the first time with my mother. It was very exciting,” Seyfried recalled. “I met Lacey Chabert for the first time, and Lindsay Lohan was in the room, and Blake Lively was playing Karen, and then I was Regina.”

The casting team decided to give the role of Regina to Rachel McAdams rather than Seyfried, but instead of rejecting her altogether, they asked her to come back and audition for Karen.

“I flew home, and they were like, ‘We think you’re more correct for Karen,'” she added. “So I was like, ‘Oh God, OK, sure.'”

Seyfried then worked with a comedy director to develop Karen’s wispy voice, which was inspired by Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, for her audition. She nailed the part and landed her debut movie role alongside McAdams, Lohan, and Chabert.

Mean Girls casting director Marci Liroff previously told Cosmopolitan UK in 2021 that Lively was a top pick for the role of Karen.

“She came down to the final tests but, at some point, some of the filmmakers said to keep looking,” Liroff said. “Amanda Seyfried had read for Regina, and we really liked her, but then (film producer) Lorne (Michaels) suggested, ‘Why don’t we make her Karen?'”

Lively was unknown at that stage because The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the movie that put her on the map, didn’t come out until 2005.

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