Jenna Fischer Filmed ‘Mean Girls’ With a Broken Shoulder: “The Wildest Experience”

Jenna Fischer put her acting skills to the test on the set of 2024’s Mean Girls. The actress revealed this week she filmed the movie with a broken shoulder.

“I shot for one day on Mean Girls, and then I didn’t have to shoot for a month,” Fischer told People. “And in that month I went on a ski trip and I fell on a sidewalk and I broke my shoulder. So I had to shoot the rest of the movie with a very newly broken shoulder.”

Fischer played Ms. Heron, the daughter of protagonist Cady (Angourie Rice) in the musical movie. After she returned with her arm in a sling, the actress said the crew got creative in accommodating the injury.

“If you notice in the movie, I am exclusively gesturing with my left arm,” she said. “It was the wildest experience. So a big part of my role in Mean Girls was pretending I didn’t have a broken shoulder.”

She continued with a few Easter eggs for eagle-eyed fans: “If you notice in the opening shot of the movie, I’m out in the middle of a field and Cady is singing, and I have a crossbody bag on. And I’m holding my crossbody bag,” she said. “The reason I’m doing that is because I had to take my sling off. That was serving as a sling for me.” 

Fischer has since been on the long road to recovery. “I’m still in physical therapy for it,” she said. “I’m still rehabbing it. It’s a complicated injury, as anyone who’s injured their shoulder will tell you.” 

Despite the one-armed adjustments, Fischer said Mean Girls was an “amazing experience.”

“I was so excited about the reaction to that movie because the people in that movie were so genuinely kind and wonderful and talented,” she said. “That young cast was just outstanding and it was one of those things where, when you finish shooting it, you think to yourself, ‘Gosh, I hope this movie does well because this is a good group.’ You want the good guy to win, right? So I was really rooting for it.”

Mean Girls also featured actors Reneé Rapp, Auliʻi Cravalho, Jaquel Spivey, Avantika, Bebe Wood, Christopher Briney, Busy Philipps and Jon Hamm. Lindsay Lohan, the star of the original 2004 movie, made a cameo in the new film, and Tina Fey and Tim Meadows reprised their roles as a math teacher and the principal of North Shore High School, respectively.