“Freakier Friday” Costume Designer Natalie O’Brien on Creating a Four-Way Body Swap
Freakier Friday, directed by Nisha Ganatra, really is freakier than its predecessor, 2003’s Freaky Friday, as the number of characters unwittingly swapping bodies has risen to four. Anna (Lindsay Lohan) and her teenage daughter, Harper (Julia Butters) land in each other’s corporeal forms, while even weirder for the group, Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her step-granddaughter-to-be, Lily (Sophia Hammons) find themselves swapped.
The medium for this switch is a disarmingly hacky multi-hyphenate palm reader, Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer), although the real culprit is the four characters’ intractable domestic strife. Anna is a single mom by choice, now engaged to Lily’s father, Eric (Manny Jacinto). Lily is English and does not want to be in Los Angeles, much less have her late mother imminently replaced. Harper is a checked-out surfer with limited patience for her mom and absolutely none for her arrogant future stepsister. Tess, having ingested a major chill pill in the last movie, is still pretty cool—her worst faults are being a bit too helpful at “co-grandparenting” and trying to on-the-spot psychologize everybody into harmony.
Costume designer Natalie O’Brien (No One Will Save You, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon) makes it easy to follow this four-way switcheroo through the characters’ looks. Being trapped in Tess’s body doesn’t dampen Lily’s outré fashion, while Harper, as her mother, clads herself in fashion ranging from diffident tomboy to confused vamp (the latter out of necessity, as the girls try to break up their parents). With the older women steering the ship, the younger girls transform into toned-down, neatly presented versions of themselves.
We spoke with O’Brien about developing Anna’s cool mom style with Lohan, bringing in references to the first film, and getting Curtis into the Y2K fashions so inexplicably adored by a certain Gen Z cohort.
How did you develop Anna’s look, and was Lindsay Lohan involved?
She is a big collaborator. She is also very tactful and smart, and she knows where her character goes. We knew we wanted to keep her rocker mom vibe, but we didn’t want it to be as hardcore as she was when she was a teen. It has to flatten out, and she has to be a mother as well. Music is in her bones, and it’s still something she does as her job. Her three-piece pink Frankie Shop oversized blazer look with the vest was something that felt David Byrne-esque, musically inspired, but also like a boss and cool mom at the same time. It also showed a nice switchover for when we see Harper in her lavender look with the vest. Their looks become congruent. You’re trying to trickle these different pieces in, so that when they do the switch, it’s like a perfect ice cream swirl.
How did placing Easter Eggs and any other references to the first movie play into the looks you developed for the sequel?
We didn’t want to hit people over the head with it, because it’s such an iconic film already. Obviously, it’s nice to put little bits in there. But no matter what, there will be no recreating Freaky Friday, the original. One of the only pulls that I wanted to do was the original Diane von Furstenberg dress that we put on Bess, who is Chad Michael’s love interest later on. That was a big one, and that was a hunt to find. There’s also a little moment when you see Anna playing Harper in this black asymmetrical dress, it is Isabel Marant. That was a similar structure to when she’s playing guitar with Pink Slip on the stage. I wanted to put in little peeks and nods.
Lily, the aspiring fashion designer, is all new. What did you want to convey with her outrageous outfits?
I think that the amount of stuff that she has in her clothing is masking something, in a way. It’s kind of [like], “Whoa, this is me. Look at this, but don’t question some things, because I don’t know if I’m open enough to show you.”
There was a clear sense that Tess retained the lessons of the first film. How did you bring that into what she wore?
It was important for her to feel a little bit cooler, a little bit more like she’s gotten into her own skin, 20 years later. I wanted her to be cool, affluent, and a touch bougie with her cashmeres and her scarves. You see a lot of that at the Brentwood Country Mart, this place in LA that’s a very put-together, California, hip spot. It was important, because she had switched with a 15-year-old already, so that stays. And at the end of the film, you have her with Lily’s inspiration, totally changing the way that she is both psychologically and through her styling and her wardrobe. I wanted to do that with everybody at the end. They all absorbed a part of their switched character and their switched persona, and it changed them. It paved the way for them to be a better version of themselves.
How did you figure out the level of fashion you wanted to use to depict Lily navigating the world in Tess’s form?
Jamie did not love everything that she was in, but that’s the perfect thing, because if she is comfortable in her outfit, you are not playing a 15-year-old girl. You have to be very uncomfortable and out of place to feel like you are Lily trapped in this sixty-something-year-old body. The costuming is storytelling. It helped us find the characters and let them find their characters. So let’s say, the pink dress. We made that dress. It’s very loud. It’s very Y2K. It’s also an homage to Trading Places. Jamie and I were talking about it, and I said, ”Okay, show me the body parts you want to hide. Talk to me about the things you’re okay with seeing. And let’s still make it look chic and young and loud for this moment that you have a monumental conversation with everybody at the table.” Because her conversation is loud, her voice is loud, so we wanted to turn it up. We also Easter egg it in the beginning and show that it’s something that she wears as a Spice Girl. It’s the same dress that’s on the postcard.
And the volume only turns up even more when Lily-as-Tess is forced into a pickleball tournament.
Jamie asked Josh [Bramer, the prop master], because she’d worked with him before on Everything Everywhere All At Once, to get the mouth guard and all the other stuff, all in pink. I was going back and forth, showing him our photos. Jamie put it all together, and it was drop-dead hilarious. We had a lot of fun. I know it was out of her comfort zone. But I even saw her at the premier afterwards, and she was like, “You know, I didn’t like the outfits, but it all worked.” It was strange and bizarre, but it made sense.
Speaking of fun and bizarre, wow, did you pull off the big food photo shoot scene for Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan)?
With the beautiful costume houses of LA, we are able to capture these things that are available to us. I really wanted to honor that, in a way. I was thinking about how a stylist would think of what this photo shoot would be. First, we knew that her album was [called] “Hungry.” So, we made it all food-oriented. I wanted to find as many food-style walkabouts—these costumes that you can get in—as we could get. I had found the cake, and we bedazzled it, adding more roses and flowers. And then we just went to town. We had hot dogs, we had strawberries, we had the grapes, and we made the teddy bears. We had some Christian Siriano pieces. That was a wild day. It was about 15, maybe 20 changes altogether for everybody.
Featured image: (L-R) Julia Butters as Harper Coleman, Lindsay Lohan as Anna Coleman, Jamie Lee Curtis as Tess Coleman and Sophia Hammons as Lily Davies in Disney’s FREAKIER FRIDAY. Photo by Glen Wilson. © 2025 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
