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Elaine Hendrix has never thought Meredith Blake was simply a villain who deserved everything the twins did to her. In interviews about The Parent Trap, Hendrix said she loved playing Meredith, recalled the comedy and camaraderie on set, and later admitted she regretted turning down similar roles. Her recollections also reveal how the film’s most chaotic camping sequence was made: Hendrix was pretending to be uncomfortable, while the lizard was a mix of real, toy and computer effects.
Hendrix said she understood Meredith—and always liked her
In Nancy Meyers’ 1998 remake of The Parent Trap, Hendrix played Meredith Blake, the poised fiancée of Nick Parker, played by Dennis Quaid. Meredith is positioned as an obstacle to the twins’ plan to reunite their parents, but Hendrix’s view of the character has long been more sympathetic than the film’s comic framing.
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“I’ve always loved Meredith Blake,” Hendrix told the Los Angeles Times in a November 5, 2018 interview. In that same conversation, reflecting on the way viewers were revisiting the character, she said: “Those kids were awful to her! And now the story is getting rewritten.” That was Hendrix’s observation about changing audience interpretations, not a measured survey of viewers.
The shift is understandable: the twins’ elaborate pranks are presented as playful, while Meredith is the adult they are trying to displace. Hendrix’s comments invite a second look at the contrast between the movie’s comic villain role and a woman who, within the story, is pursuing a future with Nick.
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The audition came together quickly
Hendrix told Backstage that her first audition was arranged at short notice: “My first audition for it was somewhat last minute. I got the appointment in the morning and went in that afternoon.” She also said she had been told she was the 433rd actor considered for Meredith. That number is her recollection of what she was told, not an independently verified casting tally.
Despite the hurried appointment, Hendrix said she knew what to do with the part. In a November 4, 2019 Backstage interview, she described how she initially resisted being associated with similar characters after the film. Looking back, she said: “That was a silly move. Now I wish I had taken every single role like her I could and cornered the market on ‘bitch,’ which is so fun to play. Live and learn.”
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Making the set fun for a young Lindsay Lohan
Lindsay Lohan played both Hallie and Annie, the separated twins at the center of the story. Hendrix remembered the cast trying to keep the work enjoyable for Lohan, who was a child during filming. “She was a hard worker, but she was still a kid and this business is hard enough so we had an extra sense of making it fun because she was a kid and we didn’t want to burn her out,” Hendrix said in TheWrap’s July 22, 2018 20th-anniversary interview.
Hendrix also recalled dancing and rapping with Lohan in the hair-and-makeup trailer. Those small moments offer a counterpoint to the movie’s on-screen plotting: the cast’s working relationships included ordinary play between takes, as well as the physical comedy that made it into the finished film.
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The camping and lizard scene was an act
In the camping sequence, Meredith struggles through the outdoors and reacts dramatically to a lizard. Hendrix said the discomfort was performance, not a reflection of her own preferences. “That whole camping scene was 100 percent acting, and I had to fake that I couldn’t hike and that I didn’t like the lizard. Look, that sequence involved a real lizard, a toy lizard and a computer lizard, so watch and see what you think is what,” she told TheWrap in 2018.
Hendrix said she liked the outdoors and reptiles. The scene’s effect combined a real animal, a toy and computer work; her recollection doesn’t identify which shot used which version, leaving viewers to judge the transitions for themselves.
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She returned to the sequence in Bustle’s August 14, 2025 interview, describing the physical business as part of the appeal of the role: “To me, that’s the juicy role. Look at all I got to do in The Parent Trap. I got to have a lizard on me and be shoved into the water in a raft.” The line captures her later appreciation of the comedy and action involved, rather than a claim that filming was effortless.
Why Meredith remains the role people remember
In the 2018 Los Angeles Times interview, Hendrix described The Parent Trap as her most recognizable work and discussed the audience’s changing response to Meredith. Her account is a personal reflection on recognition and reception, not a formal measure of either. Together with her later regret about declining similar parts, it suggests that the role’s staying power was not only a matter of being cast as the antagonist: Hendrix enjoyed the character’s range and physical comedy, and audiences continued to reassess the woman the twins set out to foil.
Hendrix also spoke to Bustle in 2025 about reuniting with Lohan for Freakier Friday, calling the reunion “surreal” and “a love fest.” Those are her later words about working together again, distinct from her memories of filming The Parent Trap as a child-and-adult cast in 1998.
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