As it turns out, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion almost didn’t happen.
During the Jan. 7 episode of The Drew Barrymore Show, star Lisa Kudrow, 61, revealed the origins of the beloved dimwitted characters when host (and fangirl) Drew Barrymore gushed about the 1997 cult classic.
Kudrow played the titular Michele in the film, opposite Mira Sorvino’s Romy. In their chat, Barrymore, 49, asked Kudrow how the movie came to be.
“One of my favorite films, I think of it so much more than a film,” Barrymore said during the segment. “It’s a world and I tend to live in it on a daily basis and I certainly quote it every day of my life.”
“What?” asked Kudrow.
“Romy and Michele!” Barrymore enthusiastically exclaimed. “Is it true, and maybe I’m off base about this, but, okay, you’re gonna be the person that knows. It wasn’t a movie at first?”
Kudrow went on to explain that the characters of Romy and Michele originally stemmed from an “equity waiver play in L.A.” that was written by Robin Schiff, who would go on to write the movie.
“So they had to do a backers audition for the play to see if they could even mount the play,” Kudrow recalled. “And they went to all the [acting] teachers, ‘Who do you recommend to audition?’, so you know, I went.”
She continued: “That was my first audition, ever, for ‘Airhead No. 2,’ Michele. We were these minor characters. We were on stage a total of seven minutes, in and out, for the whole play.”
After Barrymore asked if the screenplay came next, Kudrow surprised her by revealing that Schiff “wrote a pilot.”
“Was it gonna be a TV show?” inquired Barrymore.
“It was a pilot,” said Kudrow. “We were in the pilot, this actress Christie Mellor and I, Romy and Michele. And it was a pilot and it wasn’t very good.”
Barrymore then shared a story of how she got to work on a project over the summer with Romy and Michele’s other big star, Sorvino, who was also questioned about another project diehard fans want to know about: the Romy and Michele sequel.
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“The whole time, I kept asking her, ‘So what’s happening with Romy and Michele and the second film and the sequel?’ ” Barrymore shared with Kudrow. “We’ve talked about it here on the news, every little tidbit or morsel we get. We scream from the rooftops. There’s nothing I could ever imagine I would want more. How’s it going?”
“She said it perfectly: we’re as close as we’ve ever been,” said Kudrow, referring to Sorvino’s recent chatter about the long-awaited sequel. “There’s a script that’s really good, [by] Robin Schiff.”
“Oh my God, I just got chills, I really did,” said Barrymore.
“So it’ll happen, I mean, we’ll see,” teased Kudrow.
During an exclusive November 2024 interview with PEOPLE, Sorvino, 57, also opened up about the forthcoming Romy and Michele sequel, teasing that the project is “so close to being greenlit,” and revealing that a director has even been hired.
“They’ve done his deal, they’ve done Lisa [Kudrow] and my deals as executive producers,” Sorvino told PEOPLE. “Robin has written multiple drafts of an amazing funny script, which checks all the boxes for all the fans.”
“And they’re just going back and forth, tweaking things here and there, and [there are] rumors of shooting it second quarter next year,” she added, confirming that she and Kudrow would also reprise their roles.
“But,” Sorvino continued, “It’s not officially greenlit, so I can’t say that it’s officially greenlit.”
Directed by David Mirkin, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion follows two friends (Sorvino as Romy White and Kudrow as Michele Weinberger) who return to their high school in Tucson, Ariz., for their 10-year reunion, hoping to impress their former bullies by posing as big successes and concocting lies that eventually spin out of control.
