Mean Girls Star Jaquel Spivey on Creating a New Damian

The past few years have been momentous for Jaquel Spivey. The 25-year-old graduated college in 2021 and was promptly cast in the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop, in which he made his Broadway debut. That got him nominated for a Tony in 2022, the same year he got a call from Tina Fey about playing the beloved Damian in the Mean Girls musical movie. A week after A Strange Loop closed, he started rehearsal for Mean Girls. So what has that all been like?

"You know that scene in Wizard of Oz where Dorothy keeps falling on the bed and she's watching things outside through the window," Spivey muses during a recent Zoom call. "Like, 'Oh, there's a cow; there's the lady on the bike.' That's what it feels like the last couple of years have been. It feels like me just being like, whoa."

Even with all the praise for his work on stage, Mean Girls, out in theaters January 12, will expose Spivey to his biggest audience yet. It's the Lorne Michaels–produced film adaptation of the Tina Fey–written Broadway musical (which ran from 2018-2020), based on the classic 2004 movie that Fey also wrote and acted in. The original film, of course, stars Lindsay Lohan as the naïve, home-schooled Cady Heron, who moves from Kenya to Illinois and gets inducted into the terrifying world of high-school cliques, led by Queen Bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams). The new film is also written by Fey, but this time it stars a group of up-and-comers with astounding voices, including pop singer Renée Rapp as the vicious George (Rapp also played the role on Broadway), Moana Auliʻi Cravalho as outcast Janis ‘Imi’ike, and Spivey as the bold and sweet Damian Hubbard.

It comes with an added level of pressure given that Spivey is playing a character people already know and love, the teen who made "She doesn't even go here" a catchphrase for the ages. But Spivey is certain he's made the role his own.

"I am nothing of what the past Damians have been," he says. "One, being a Black man, we can start there, obviously, but just also knowing that Damian, for me, as I got older, represented being able to be queer without the idea of putting on a show. I feel like sometimes we have to perform our queerness, because I think that's what keeps us the safest. It keeps you safe when you're entertaining someone. Damian is like, 'I am me. I happen to be queer. I happen to be plus-size. But none of this is for your entertainment. This is for my entertainment. You're in my show.'"

Spivey first saw Mean Girls because it was a favorite of his older sister, and he was always fascinated by Damian as a male character who was hanging around with a bunch of girls—just like he did. He remembers rewinding the scene where Damian, originally played by Daniel Franzese, threw a shoe back at some jerks who were taunting him while he belted Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” in a talent show. "That was so cool to little Jaquel," he says.

More broadly, movie musicals were Spivey's introduction to the world he would soon long to join. His love of Jennifer Hudson's performance in Dreamgirls sent him down a YouTube rabbit hole that introduced him to the original production, as well as other Broadway classics. Spivey didn't necessarily expect to end up in film, however. "I didn't take 'Acting for the Camera' in college because I needed to pass a math class," he says.

Damian ended up being a "blessing that I did not look for," Spivey adds. A Strange Loop, about a Black gay man wrestling with his inner demons and family's homophobia, was a difficult show for Spivey. As Usher, Spivey was on stage for the entirety of the 100-minute runtime. "It was a battle only because that story is heavy enough, but then for your voice to be like, 'I'm tired today and there's no intermission to go back and regroup, there's no bathroom breaks, there aren't things that humans need to survive,’" he says. "And then on top of that, I am in a show that is putting trauma on display at every turn." With Damian, he didn't have to deal with that pain. "I'm very grateful for Damian, because he showed me that this body and my existence can still exude joy," he says.

To prepare for the filming, Spivey avoided all previous portrayals of Damian, including the original film, which is perpetually playing on cable. "Honestly, I still have not seen the movie in over a year, and that's very difficult, especially for anybody who travels, because no matter what hotel you go to in the world, Mean Girls is playing as soon as you get there," he explains. "Mean Girls and Law & Order: SVU are in rotation."

When it came to repeating some of the iconic material, he tried to think how he himself at 17 would have uttered "She doesn't even go here," his sister's favorite line. But he also got to throw in his own reference points, including a shoutout to Beyoncé. "As a BeyHive-adjacent kid, it was nice to be able to add that in there, especially as a new touch of, 'of course this Damian would love some Beyoncé,'" he says. This new Damian also eschews performing Aguilera's "Beautiful" for an interpretation of the iCarly theme song—in French.

As for where he goes after Damian, Spivey just wants to keep representing people like him. "I'd love to do more projects that celebrate my body type and celebrate my ethnicity and celebrate my sexuality without using them as the poster child of the project," he says. "I just am who I am."