How Lindsay Lohan ‘Mean Girls’ cameo calls back to original movie

The new “Mean Girls” movie includes quite a few familiar faces. Tina Fey, who co-wrote the original film and the subsequent stage musical, reprises her role as math teacher Ms. Norbury. Tim Meadows is back on-screen as the high school’s principal.

And then there’s that cameo, the one likely to elicit gasps from longtime fans. (No, not Megan Thee Stallion, though she turns up as well.)

Lindsay Lohan — who starred in the 2004 movie as Cady Heron, the once-homeschooled newbie caught up with the popular, fearsome Plastics — makes a surprise appearance in one of the movie musical’s final scenes, as the moderator of the climactic mathematics competition.

“Tonight will be a culmination of all you’ve worked for,” she says, explaining the rules of the match and reading off the problems that the two teams compete to solve correctly.

Throughout the scene, Lohan makes funny, meta-textual references to the original movie. When the game play requires a tie-breaking face-off, she points to the first film by saying, “Well, this has only ever happened once before.”

And when Cady (Angourie Rice) thinks out loud about why she can’t recall the math problem’s relevant lesson, Lohan interrupts her train of thought by telling her, “Honey, I don’t know your life.” (After all, the person who knows this character best is Lohan herself.)

Lindsay Lohan as Cady, from left, Amanda Seyfried as Karen and Lacey Chabert as Gretchen in the 2004 movie, ‘Mean Girls.’

(Michael Gibson / Paramount Pictures)

Cady comes to the realization that comparing herself to other women isn’t a healthy way to make herself feel good. “This is not a competition,” she exclaims, and Lohan then reminds her of the setting: “It kind of is, though.”

After Cady reprises the song “Stupid With Love,” the scene echoes the original and closes with Cady’s classroom flashback and her iconic winning answer: “The limit does not exist!” And yes, Kevin G (Mahi Alam) once again rips his shirt off in victory.

Lohan’s appearance was kept a secret throughout the film’s press cycle. When asked on the “Today” show who from the original film appears in the new movie, Fey shrugged, “I don’t know, you have to come see. There are wonderful surprises throughout the movie, I’d say.” And though Lohan attended the new movie’s premiere, she only spoke of the first film’s legacy during interviews on the red carpet.

This cameo isn’t the first time Lohan has revisited “Mean Girls.” Last year, Lohan — along with Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried, Rajiv Surendra and Daniel Franzese — reprised their roles for Walmart’s Black Friday commercials, which checked in on the beloved characters as parents of high school students themselves.

And in 2019, she and her fellow cast members led a social media campaign with the Thirst Project to raise funds for freshwater wells in Uganda. The efforts took place on, of course, Oct. 3.