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It’s Mean Girls Day. Here’s Where the Cast Is Now

7 minute read

October 3 is no normal day. It’s Mean Girls Day, as any ’90s kid worth their salt knows, and it always merits a celebration. This year marks 13 years since the popular – and quotable Tina Fey film was first released, but it’s still relevant in the conversation. (And some things certainly haven’t changed: “fetch” still hasn’t happened.)

Featuring a collection of child stars, actors on the cusp of greatness and comic icons like Amy Poehler, the Lindsay Lohan-helmed hit lives large in contemporary U.S. cultural memory: there’s even a new Mean Girls musical debuting at the end of October with an upcoming Broadway run, and Lohan and her teen costars regularly keep up their connection with the movie through social media winks and nods.

So while we wait for an official sequel to get the green light, we’ll always have Oct. 3, the day that beautiful stranger Aaron Samuels finally spoke to Cady Heron. In honor of this true national holiday, here’s an update on where the movie’s teen queens (and misfits) are now.

Lindsay Lohan

Paramount Pictures; Getty Images

It’s been a tumultuous 13 years since Mean Girls for Lohan, the popular child star of Parent Trap fame, A-list celebrity status and a complicated, much-photographed young adulthood in the harsh light of the paparazzi. Movies like Herbie: Fully Loaded and the Elizabeth Taylor made-for-TV biopic Liz & Dick were met with little to no critical success, while her supporting roles in A Prairie Home Companion and Bobby were better received. But Lohan has also dabbled beyond cinema, going on to try her hand at fashion design with Emanuel Ungaro and her own brand 6126 in the late-oughts and stage acting on London’s West End in 2014. More recently, Lohan has been filming for a role in the second season of the TV show Sick Note, which stars Harry Potter‘s Rupert Grint. She’s also quite a globetrotter, spending time in hotspots like Dubai and Istanbul and sharing regular updates on social media. And oh yeah, she’s definitely still a Mean Girls fan: not only has she been public about her eagerness to work on a sequel, but just last week she shared an Instagram snap while re-watching the classic.

Rachel McAdams

Paramount Pictures; Getty Images

2004 was McAdams’s breakout year, with the successes of both The Notebook and Mean Girls launching her to immediate stardom as both a comic and dramatic actor. Ever since, she’s kept herself busy onscreen with hits like the cult favorite Wedding Crashers and Woody Allen charmer Midnight in Paris, and a recurring role in the Sherlock Holmes big-screen action franchise and her lead role on the second season of True Detective. Next up, McAdams will pop up in new murder mystery movie Game Night alongside Jason Bateman. Then there’s the more sober Disobedience, which just screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and tells a story of forbidden love. She’s also not afraid of throwing it back to her Regina George days lately, even giving a shout-out to fellow co-star Lacey Chabert for her birthday last week.

Lacey Chabert

Paramount Pictures; Getty Images

Chabert may have met her pop culture peak as Gretchen Wieners, the forever-iconic character she played in Mean Girls. Since then, she’s made her biggest mark as the star in a number of Hallmark channel movies from Elevator Girl to Christian Mingle to the more recent romance Moonlight in Vermont. But just because you haven’t seen Chabert’s face on marquee posters doesn’t mean she hasn’t been busy. On the contrary, she’s credited as the voice for a bunch of animated franchises, like a few Star Wars video games, a Transformers cartoon series spin-off and Justice League Action. Next up, though, Chabert is back in her Hallmark comfort zone with All of My Heart: Inn Love, airing in October.

Amanda Seyfried

Paramount Pictures; Getty Images

Mean Girls was just the beginning for Seyfried, who got her start in soaps and modeling before debuting on the big screen as the much-loved Plastic princess Karen Smith. She went on to showcase her acting — and vocal — chops in hit movie musicals Mamma Mia! and Les Miserables over the ensuing decade, while also popping up on the small screen for series like Veronica Mars, Big Love and the recent Twin Peaks revival. We’ll get to see her again soon in the new Mamma Mia sequel, too, where she’ll reprise her role as Meryl Streep’s character’s daughter. In other news, she got hitched with fellow actor Thomas Sadoski, and they welcomed their first child this spring. She’s also recently been fostering a litter of kittens. Too kind, Karen.

Jonathan Bennett

Paramount Pictures; Getty Images

Bennett kicked things off like many of his costars with a spot in the soaps — All My Children in his case — before winning the prime role of Aaron Samuels, high school heartthrob and the reason for Mean Girls Day’s existence in the first place. He subsequently popped up on Veronica Mars, like Amanda Seyfried. And that’s not all of his history with the Plastics; he was in the Hallmark movie Elevator Girl with Lacey Chabert in 2010, too, with whom he’s said he remains close. While he’s racked up plenty of acting credits in the last few years and even got a chance on Dancing with the Stars in 2014, his main gig in front of the camera is pretty sweet at the moment: he’s a host on the Food Network for Cake Wars.

But lately, he’s also mentioned that he’s very much up for a Mean Girls sequel. Is the world ready to see a grown-up Aaron Samuels, though?

“I think, well obviously, my character would probably still be in college,” he predicted recently of his status in a potential sequel. “I think my character would be the Van Wilder of Aaron Samuels. He would just be the perpetual college student.”

Lizzy Caplan

Paramount Pictures; Getty Images

The former Freaks and Geeks actor has kept up a steady stream of acting roles after Mean Girls, appearing on everything from Smallville to True Blood to New Girl over the intervening years after she made her big splash as the inimitable Janis. Perhaps her most notable starring role, however, has been as Virginia Johnson on Masters of Sex for four seasons opposite Michael Sheen, a part for which she was nominated for an Emmy in 2014. As Johnson, Caplan made the switch from her prior comedy roles to a much more dramatic character — and had to get comfortable with on-camera nudity in the period drama exploring the roots of the sexual revolution. And just this September, she tied the knot with British actor Tom Riley at a wedding ceremony in Italy.

Daniel Franzese

Paramount Pictures; Getty Images

After playing the delightful Damian on Mean Girls, Franzese went on to nab smaller roles in a number of TV and movie comedies, eventually grabbing a recurring role in HBO’s two-season show Looking and ABC’s short-lived drama Conviction. In 2014, he came out publicly — and just this past summer, he proposed to boyfriend Joseph Bradley Phillips at the same Starbucks where the two first met over a year ago, sneakily hiding the ring in a cup that the barista then served up to his soon-fiancé. He’s also keeping up his comedy chops, performing standup at Burbank’s Flappers Comedy Club for a run this fall, according to his Instagram.

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Write to Raisa Bruner at raisa.bruner@time.com