Mean Girls cast break down their updated 'Jingle Bell Rock' dance

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Mean Girls.

When it came time to bring Mean Girls back to theaters — now as a musical — there was one iconic scene that screenwriter Tina Fey knew she'd have to tweak.

In the 2004 film, the Plastics perform a dance to "Jingle Bell Rock" at the school talent show. Things then go terribly awry when the CD starts skipping and Gretchen (Lacey Chabert) accidentally kicks the boombox into the crowd, leaving Cady (Lindsay Lohan) to save the day by singing the song. But considering that it's 2024 and no one listens to CDs anymore, Fey started thinking about how they could tweak the scene.

"I sent the directors these YouTube videos, which were supercuts of girls being like, 'We used to do gymnastics. Let's see if we can still do it,' and they can't," Fey says.

Co-director Sam Jayne adds, "It was Tina's idea to do the gymnastics stunt, and it's such a great moment because it could be absolutely ripped apart on social media. And the fetch moment happens right before it, so we wanted to lean into the breakdown and insecurities of the Plastics leading up to that fall, because really the thing that causes that fall is the group's disintegration."

Once they started filming, it wasn't long before the cast had to grab their Santa hats. "That was in our first week of filming," Angourie Rice, who plays Cady, says. "That was the first Friday, so we were all so overwhelmed from the first week of filming and then to go and get dressed in sequin Santa outfits and do this dance in front of 200 background and 150 crew was so surreal. And I definitely in that moment thought, 'Oh my gosh, people are going to see this in the cinemas.'"

Regina George herself, Reneé Rapp, adds, "I just remember being like, 'Nobody could get me to wear a skirt other than Tina. Literally. How the f--- am I in a sparkly skirt, ass out week one of filming?'"

Although there was talk of putting Rapp on wires, in the end, they did not. "We ended up half shooting it with me, but I was like, 'I'm not falling. That's not my thing.' So we had a stunt person and she was lovely," Rapp says.

For Bebe Wood, who plays Gretchen, that meant that, even if only for a short moment, she did have to pull off the stunt. "I worked a little bit with the stunt team to hold Regina up and I just remember the first time we did it, one of the first takes, they were like, 'Make sure to move out of the way quickly so you don't get kicked in the face,'" Wood recalls. "I was stressed out a little bit because I have to hold her up for a short amount of time, but I think they did some takes with us and without us."

In the end, it created the perfect embarrassing moment for Regina's (literal) downfall. "I love that there was this silly end to this really sexy number," Avantika, who plays Karen, says. "It feels so high school to want to be sexy and seductive and have it end so terribly."

Mean Girls is in theaters now.

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