If actress Busy Phillips could do it all over again, she probably would've opted to star in Mean Girls over White Chicks.
Both movies are what the actress discussed on the NPR podcast Fresh Air last week, as she finally got the chance to star in the Mean Girls musical reboot that was released in January. When asked about her opinion on the original film, Phillips brought up her embarrassment around White Chicks, where she was a supporting character to leads Marlon and Shawn Wayans. Starring in the 2004 comedy also halted her from auditioning for Mean Girls, which as released the same year.
"I was jealous that I wasn’t in it!” Phillips told Fresh Air host Ann Marie Baldonado around the three-minute mark. "You know, to be honest, just another job I didn’t get. No. I loved the original, but I was salty that I wasn’t—that I couldn’t even audition for it because I was filming White Chicks, or I’d already gotten the part for White Chicks. The filming was overlapping."
"No shade to White Chicks—although all shade to White Chicks, because at the time, when it came out, it was, like, universally panned," Philipps recounted. “People hated it. It was, like, honestly embarrassing that I was in it in the industry and the world at large."
In the film, where the Wayans played two FBI agents who go undercover as white women, Brittany and Tiffany Wilson, Phillips played Karen Googlestein, a member of a trio of white women who befriend the Wilsons.
"Now, perspective is everything, and I am very happy to say that over the years, I realized what an actual cult classic White Chicks has become," she continued. “I’m so proud that I was in that ridiculous movie in 2004."
But nearly 20 years after the film came out, Marlon Wayans has been a staunch advocate for the comedy, although he told GQ in 2022 that it would likely have him "canceled" if released today.
“I think they’re needed. I don’t know what planet we’re on, where you think people don’t need laughter, and that people need to be censored and canceled,” Wayans said at the time. “If a joke is gonna get me canceled, thank you for doing me that favor. It’s sad that society is in this place where we can’t laugh anymore.”
He continued, “I ain’t listening to this damn generation. I ain’t listening to these folks: these scared-ass people, these scared executives.”
