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The director and leading cast member of Freakier Friday, the soon-to-be-released sequel to Disney’s 2003 body-swap comedy Freaky Friday, have criticised the “hurtful” Asian stereotypes of the older film and said they “owed audiences to make it right”.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, director Nisha Ganatra, a Canadian whose parents were first generation immigrants from India, said of the 2003 film: “I remember watching it and feeling torn, mostly about the Asian representation … It was something I brought up right away when I had my first meetings with the producers. I had a moment of the presentation that was like, ‘problematic Asian representation!’”
Ganatra was referring to a pivotal scene in Freaky Friday, in which stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, playing a mother and daughter, read the messages in a pair of magical fortune cookies in a Chinese restaurant which then triggers their body swap. (This is not a scene that appears in either the original 1972 novel, written by Mary Rodgers or the 1976 film adaptation starring Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris.)
Freakier Friday, written by Jordan Weiss, has dropped a repeat of the Chinese restaurant scene, given Rosalind Chao and Lucille Soong, the actors who appeared in the 2003 scene, cameo appearances, and, according to Ganatra, provides “little moments that don’t betray this movie, but were satisfying for people who found hurtful moments in the last one”.
The Philippines-born Canadian actor Manny Jacinto, who plays Lohan’s fiance in Freakier Friday, also expressed concerns about the earlier film, saying: “I remember watching the first Freaky Friday and being like, this did not age very well, regarding the diverse characters.”
Jacinto added: “Knowing Nisha and speaking to other people within our circles, I knew we had a captain who was very much aware of those archetypes, or those issues presented in the first one.”
Ganatra said: “It was a different time and wasn’t done intentionally [in the 2003 film], but it’s a real thing. It’s something I, being Asian, was super conscious of.”
