Why is everyone so obsessed with Mean Girls’ Regina George?

Two weeks ago, the internet was abuzz over the first official trailer for Tina Fey’s 2024 Mean Girls reboot, based on the successful broadway musical spin-off. 

Soundtracked to Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Get Him Back!’, the trailer features a refreshed young cast of pink-clad Plastics – and existential dread-inducing taglines like, “This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls“. 

Indeed, a lot has changed in the near twenty years since the original 2004 Mean Girls movie came out, starring Lindsay Lohan as previously home-schooled teen Cady Heron, who is introduced to the dog eat dog world of American high school through a trio of so-called Plastics, AKA the most popular girls in the school, led by platinum blonde queen bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams). 

As a thirteen-year-old girl when the first movie came out, I resonated a lot with its themes of unstable self-identity and cut-throat social climbing. Unlike other movie depictions of generic school bullying, Mean Girls tapped into the complicated nuances of teenage female friendships, in which sometimes your best friends can also be your worst enemies. 

However, I had it lucky compared to teens now. While social media was beginning to bud in the early oughts, it was still limited to desktop computers with cranky dial-up, and if your parents wouldn’t top up the credit on your Motorola Razr then any friendship drama was thankfully left behind at the school gates. 

Nowadays, smartphones have teens swamped by societal pressures 24/7; social media the ultimate “burn book” swirling with slights and rumours. While it will be interesting to see how the Mean Girls musical navigates updating the original’s familiarities with modern day dilemmas, it’s perhaps more interesting to note how Regina George has taken centre stage as the more empathetic heroine to Gen-Z audiences. 

Regina George is so fetch

From Maleficent to Harley Quinn to (depressingly) the Joker, antiheroes have long been a thing, with audiences identifying and sympathising with villains’ more textured characters. 

While manipulative and mean, Regina George’s character was arguably always the more interesting – and certainly iconic. Her self-confidence and blunt honesty have become more relatable to a social media savvy Gen-Z, eclipsing the shy naivety of protagonist Cady Heron. 

From, “Whatever, I’m getting cheese fries” to “That is the ugliest effing skirt I have ever seen”, Regina also has some of the original movie’s most quotable lines, many of which have been turned into fan edits on the video app TikTok or used to recreate scenes – like when Regina gets run over by a bus (sorry, 19-year-old spoiler alert). 

Even the poster for the upcoming Mean Girls musical puts Regina George front and centre, with Reneé Rapp reprising her broadway role. 

Speaking to Teen Vogue in 2019 about playing Regina on stage, Rapp said, “There are more layers that you get to go through in the musical than the movie. I wanted [Regina’s] intelligence to be something that was really glorified. There’s a lot to her. And [if I’m playing her] the whole time as this cruel human being, nobody’s going to want her to come back from being hit by a bus.”

Regina’s character highlights that tricky tension between presenting an archetypal villain and sympathetic teen, her toxic behaviours encouraged by environmental pressures and deep-seated insecurities. This has opened up space for online discourse, which continues to give Regina’s character new dimensions, some even speculating that she was a closeted lesbian. 

Perhaps, ultimately, the popularity of such antiheroes is the ways in which they allow us to confront our own inner-monsters. Regina reminds us that whether hyped up on hormones, struggling to find a sense of self, or just for survival, we’ve all been a mean girl too.