Exclusive: TheParentTrap is still recreated by devoted fans more than 20 years later, but Lisa Ann Walter wasn’t exactly thrilled to wear the now iconic getup.
“[Nancy] was right because of how you have to balance a movie. I can’t be running around in — because I’m very busty. And in fact, Dennis, he’s such a mischievous little boy. But he said to me one day — because I kept trying to put extra mascara on, I like the glam. I was always a disco girl, overly made up, sparkly eyeshadow. So this is much more of a downplayed. They colored my hair from what it was, which was like long highlights to, as Nancy said, s—t brown,” she recalled to.
“And so, to me, that said everything,” she gushed. “And as a writer myself, I’m like, yeah. A lot of people thought, ‘Oh, was that his sister?’ Like, there had to be no confusion on that sexual energy. Because people had to figure about who was who and who were we rooting for. And so I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I get it.’ That was good.”Chessy figures out that Hallie is really Annie.“It was a pretty singular moment in my acting career.
For Walter, as “far as she was concerned,” Chessy was Hallie’s mother. “And the other baby too,” she added. “I mean, I know she has a mother, but that character is maternal. So I know that she had to always think, ‘This is a stupid idea.’ And let the other one go. And she is just seeing her baby again, the other one, after 11 years. So I was putting myself into that emotional space for 72 takes.
“That happened one time, because I felt a tear come down and I’m trying to cover. Because [Hallie] asked me not to [cry] with her look. So I’m covering, so I wipe it away real quick, like, ‘Yeah, nothing’s happening here,’ and that’s the take they use. And it was toward the end,” she explained. “I auditioned with that scene doing it the way basically that you see in the finished product. Then they tried a million other ways and Nancy and [producer] Charles [Shyer] were in discussion about it.