Can you imagine? (Picture: Getty)
Amanda Seyfried has blown our minds with some new Mean Girls trivia, just when you thought you’d heard it all.
The 37-year-old has revealed that Blake Lively came very close to playing her part of Karen Smith, the lovably dim member of the Plastics group alongside Gretchen Wieners, Cady Heron and Queen Bee Regina George.
We all came to know and love Seyfried in the part, opposite Lacey Chabert, Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams respectively – but it all could have been very different.
‘I’d flown out to LA for the first time with my mother. It was very exciting,’ Seyfried, who is currently working on a Thema & Louise musical, 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.
‘I flew home and they were like… “We think you’re more correct for Karen.” So I was like, “Oh god, OK, sure,”’ the Dropout star told Vanity Fair.
Amanda was initially in the room auditioning as Regina (Picture: Getty)
Amanda as Karen Smith with Rachel McAdams as Regina George and Lacey Chabert as Gretchen Wieners in the established crew Plastics (Picture: CBS via Getty Images)
Seyfried also explained how she then developed the iconic ‘whispery’ Karen voice with a comedic director ahead of her audition to really ‘nail’ her try-out, and that it was inspired by Marilyn Monroe.
Thankfully it all paid off, with McAdams stepping in to provide the perfect Plastics leader as Regina, and Lively doing pretty well for herself afterwards on some show called Gossip Girl.
Mean Girls casting director Marci Liroff previously revealed to Cosmopolitan UK that Lively was a top pick for the role of Karen, before she’d got her big break on The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.
Blake, who has recently given birth to her fourth child with husband Ryan Reynolds, went on to star in other projects, including Gossp Girl (Picture: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
‘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 [producer] Lorne [Michaels] suggested, “Why don’t we make her Karen?”’
Musing on her (eventual) character’s popularity to Vanity Fair, Seyfried added: ‘I think the reason we love Karen so much — and also the reason that she’s so funny — is that she is just being brutally honest, and it’s so beautiful, and it’s what makes her so endearing.’
The star also cited the fact that ‘she’s not that smart, but she totally knows it’ and always gives a ‘true reaction’.
‘And I think we all love people like that because we can trust them.’
Lively is understood to have recently given birth to her four child with husband Ryan Reynolds after posting a picture to Instagram of her, Reynolds and his mother Tammy, ahead of the Super Bowl, where she no longer had a bump and said she had ‘been busy.’
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Fans were quick to assume this meant the couple had welcomed their baby, although no announcement has been made.
They are already parents to three daughters: James, eight; Inez, six; and three-year-old Betty.
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But did she have a fifth sense?
