Warning: Spoilers for Freakier Friday ahead.
“I had a huge Avril Lavigne phase when I was younger,” says Sophia Hammons, who plays Lily in Freakier Friday, the sequel to the 2003 film starring a then-teenage Lindsay Lohan. Hammons remembers watching the original film when she was 12 or 13 and loving Lohan’s character Anna’s rock ‘n roll style. “Then recently, I was talking to Lindsay and she told me that the inspiration for Anna's look was Avril Lavigne. I was like, ‘Oh, this actually makes sense now.’”
And don’t get her started on Chad Michael Murray, who reprises his role of Jake in the film.
“Julia [Butters, who plays Harper] and I were so excited for Chad. I remember he had come to set for a fitting or something, and we were like, ‘Is Chad here? Is Chad here?’ and then we ended up saying hi,” she laughs.
An Avril Lavigne phase, a Chad Michael Murray crush, an experience watching Freaky Friday as a preteen… these are Millennial-coded activities, but Hammons is only 18 years old. In the movie, however, she plays both high schooler Lily and the body-swapped Tess, reprised by Jamie Lee Curtis, who is now in her 60s.
In Freakier Friday, Lily has recently moved from the UK to Los Angeles with her dad Eric (Manny Jacinto) after the death of her mom. The plot parallels what Anna experiences in the original movie; part of Anna’s central conflict is learning to accept a new addition to their family while holding on to the memory of her dad. Lily and Harper are classmates turned nemeses who are forced together when Eric and Anna (reprised by Lohan) fall in love and start to plan their wedding.
But then the four-way body swap strikes: surfer girl Harper switches with her mom Anna, who is now a record producer for Maitreyi Ramakrishnan’s pop star Elle. Meanwhile, Type A fashion girl Lily switches with her future step-grandma Tess. Chaos, joy rides, and life lessons ensue as Lily and Harper hatch a plan to break their parents up and get their bodies back.
“It's funny, I have two different sides of me, and one is Lily pretty much and the other Tess just coincidentally,” Hammons says. “I think I'm the mom therapist of the group, just in my life.”
Hammons grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and was raised by a single dad. A theater kid, she begged her dad to audition for roles on Broadway, but when she’d make it to the last round, she’d be told she was too tall. “I guess I was just a tall 12-year-old, but also the main thing was that 12-year-old boys don't grow as fast as 12-year-old girls,” she says. (She’s now a respectable 5’7”.) Her dad took her to walk around Central Park after and suggested maybe she should try film.
The switch paid off. In 2020, she acted in the Emmy-winning docuseries The Social Dilemma, and then in 2021 starred in the Disney Channel Original Movie Under Wraps and its sequel. Freakier Friday is her biggest role to date, and still, she manages to stand toe-to-toe with Curtis, an acting legend. Their relationship is an emotional highlight of the film, which is full of callbacks to the original but also has a beating heart of its own.
“I've looked up to Jamie for so long,” Hammons says. The major comic relief, like in the original, is in how the teenagers take on the mannerisms of adults — and vice versa. To pull off some level of believability, Curtis and Hammons spent a lot of time just watching each other, paying attention to how the other moved as a person and a character.
“Sometimes she would clock me,” Hammons says. “I remember when she was like, ‘You go like this a lot.’” She makes a gesture of pushing her hair out of her face; at the time, she had curtain bangs that constantly got in her eyes. “I play with my hair a lot and she talks with her hands a lot.”
Hammons and Curtis share a moving scene near the end of the film, where Lily (in Tess’s body) admits that she’s scared to lose the memory of her mom, but that she’s come around to the idea of a fresh start after all. That she needs more family, not less. “It's a very sweet moment that they share because it's rare that you see a teenager comforting an adult who's weeping like that,” Hammons notes. Filming that scene changed Hammons’s brain chemistry, she says. It was at the end of a long day, and they pulled it off in only a few takes with their director, Nisha Ganatra.
“The biggest thing we had to remember was just to be vulnerable and honest with each other,” she says. “We are locking eyes in that scene for a majority of it. We even talked about it too, as soon as we locked eyes, it's like no one else was there. The cameras disappeared. There's no director watching behind the monitor. There's no one fixing the lights. There literally was no one there as soon as we were looking at each other.”
After they finished the scene, Hammons remembers that Curtis went up to Hammons’s real-life dad, who was on set that day, and kissed him on the cheek. “She just thanked him for, I don't even know, me, I guess,” she smiles. “My dad was sobbing when he saw it on set. Then when he saw it in the final product, he was like, ‘Oh, my God, it looks even better all put together.’”
It’s also fun to watch the dynamic between Hammons and Butters. Butters, who has been acting professionally since she was 14, was the first person Hammons met during the filming process.
“When they told me that I was going to be doing the chemistry read with her, I was freaking out,” Hammons says. “I am a huge fan of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, one of my favorite movies of all time and part of that was because of Julia. She is phenomenal in that. In my childhood bedroom, I have a Once Upon a Time in Hollywood poster. She's on the poster. It seriously was cosmic.”
The chemistry also felt kind of cosmic. “Later [the casting team] told us that they actually had left us in a room because they just heard us laughing so much,” she grins. “They're like, ‘We don't need to bring them into the audition room yet. We're just going to leave them hanging out because they sound like they're having fun.’ I love that girl so much.”
Lily and Harper bring to life a major theme in the film: the power that teens do and don’t have, and how they take agency over their lives in small, important ways. That as they grow up in the world and learn how to respect boundaries, teenagers are deserving of respect, too.
Hammons says she’s always been someone who goes after what she wants, but that she also has people-pleasing tendencies; she’s learning to develop her own boundaries, too. “I am always like, ‘Yes, of course. I'll do this, I'll do this, I'll do this,’ even when I'm super drained or super tired,” she admits. “Because I'm scared of being seen as someone who complains or someone who's taking an opportunity for granted. But I've learned that there's a difference between complaining and then also just listening to your body and being like, ‘I can't do this right now.’”
It’s something she talked about with Lohan, who also began her career with Disney and who has only recently made her way back into the public eye after years of dealing with the pressures of her career and fame.
“She's had an awesome and insane journey, and it's so inspiring. She's such a wonderful human. It's so lovely to see her succeed still,” Hammons says. “She did mention to Julia and I the other day that one of the biggest things she's had to learn in her career was how to say no and how to set boundaries for herself, especially because now she's a new mom. This [job] is my favorite thing, but it can be very overwhelming and chaotic. It's important to take time for yourself and prioritize your mental and physical health. It was very inspiring to hear her be like, ‘It's okay to say no.’”
Being inspired and empowered by Lindsay Lohan? Pop culture really is a circle.
