Of Course Janis Ian Was the Real Mean Girl

By Rebecca Fishbein  |  October 23, 2019 | 3:30am
EntertainmentMovies
Of Course Janis Ian Was the Real Mean Girl
Screenshot: (Paramount)

Here is the thing about Mean Girls’ Janis Ian: she’s pretty mean. She doesn’t punch down like Regina George or backstab like Cady Heron, but she does try to rope the new girl into ruining someone else’s life for revenge, and that’s, you know, not nice. Janis Ian is not nice. Is she fucking awesome? Have I spent my adult years trying to mimic her eye makeup? Absolutely, but if you ask Lizzie Caplan, she’s also kind of a villain.

“She’s layered,” Caplan told Buzzfeed News’s AM to DM program on Tuesday, when asked about a Twitter thread that put Janis in the Mean Girl category. “She was way craftier than the other mean girls. She was like a mean girl with spy plans. With purpose.” This is obviously true, since Janis’s schemes included such devious acts as breaking Regina up with her boyfriend and separating her from her friends, plus she was pretty shitty about her teacher having to moonlight at the mall. Does Janis know nothing about public school salaries?

Caplan, who was promoting her upcoming starring role on Castle Rock’s upcoming second season, was also asked about whether or not she’d be open to revisiting her Mean Girls character in the future. “I don’t know what that looks like. Mean Moms? Ugh,” Caplan said. She did note that she’d be down to be Janis Ian again, but: “I’m not really waiting by the phone for the Mean Girls reboot.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say Mean Moms’ll be in theaters by 2021.

 
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