Lohan and Lee Curtis hit red carpet for 'freaky' film
The sequel comes more than two decades after the body-swap comedy Freaky Friday became a global hit.
Lee Curtis and Lohan reunite as Tess and Anna Coleman, years after the pair first endured an identity crisis in the 2003 film.
Anna has a daughter and soon-to-be stepdaughter of her own, and is navigating the challenges of merging families when the story gets freakier.
Directed by Nisha Ganatra, the movie is based on the novel by American composer and screenwriter Mary Rodgers, published in 1972.
The original film earned Disney $US160 million ($A248 million) worldwide, well surpassing its production budget of about $US26 million ($A40 million).
The sequel marks Lohan's return to Hollywood after she was absent for most of the 2010s before her appearance in Falling For Christmas in 2022.
A social media post announcing her return with Lee Curtis in Freakier attracted more than one million likes.
Lohan rose to fame in her role as identical twins in the 1998 film The Parent Trap.
Freakquel co-star Lee-Curtis is an actor, producer, and children's author, best known for her breakout role in the 1978 rendition of Halloween and its six sequels.
Lohan and Lee Curtis attended the Australian premiere at Bondi Junction in Sydney on Tuesday, following multiple appearances at premieres across the world including London, New York and Mexico City.
The film will be released in Australian cinemas on Thursday.
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9 News
27 minutes ago
- 9 News
From BookTok to New York Times bestseller: How Aussie teacher defied the odds
Your web browser is no longer supported. To improve your experience update it here She'd spent the last few years working part-time while pursuing a writing career that had landed her on bestseller lists around the world. Passionate about education as well as authoring, she worked hard to juggle both careers. That ended in early 2025. Once a primary school teacher, now you can find Stacey McEwan's name on bestseller lists around the world. (Stacey McEwan/Facebook) "Due to the critical teacher shortage , I was told 'you either need to come back to teaching full time or you need to quit,'" McEwan told "So I quit the department altogether, and just went full throttle on authoring." Have you got a story? Contact reporter Maddison Leach at mleach@ Fortunately, her latest release A Forbidden Alchemy released to rave reviews in July and even earned a spot on the New York Times bestseller list. But McEwan is painfully aware that her success (and income) as an author is not guaranteed, even with one of the most powerful online communities behind her. Born and raised on the Gold Coast, McEwan spent 11 years in the classroom. She wrote fantasy novels on the side and tried getting a few published but was rejected again and again. "I didn't really know what I was doing," she admitted. McEwan spent years writing books and being rejected by publishers before her debut novel was picked up/ (Instagram/@staceymcewanbooks) The Australian publishing industry is highly competitive and the odds of a debut author's unsolicited submission actually being purchased for publication are low. Knowing that, McEwan focused on teaching until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Like millions of Aussies, she downloaded TikTok as a way to pass the time during lockdown and was immediately sucked into BookTok, the app's reading community. There she racked up thousands of followers "almost overnight". It was her husband who suggested she leverage that budding internet fame to self-publish her first novel, a fantasy book she'd already written. Instead, British-based publisher Angry Robot "swept in" and offered to buy it. McEwan planned to self-publish her first novel, Ledge, until a publisher "swept in" and offered her a book deal. (Stacey McEwan/Facebook) McEwan signed her first book deal and published her debut fantasy novel, Ledge , in 2021. Two sequels followed in 2023 and 2024. The Aussie mum of two admits she owes a lot of her initial success to TikTok and timing. "I'm not too proud to say that if I hadn't have put my idiot face online, that this wouldn't be happening right now," she said. There's no doubt the Angry Robot book deal was influenced by her BookTok popularity and the fact that she was pushing a romantasy (romance and fantasy) novel right as the genre was exploding. And romantasy is its hottest subgenre right now. "It was really just a case of perfect timing," McEwan said. Her first three novels became bestsellers, boosting her social profile even more. But in the age of online hate mobs and celebrity 'cancellations', being a big deal on social media doesn't always have a happy ending. All it takes is one move – legitimate, or perceived – for an author to get 'cancelled' these days. It can make the career feel precarious, especially for breakout authors like McEwan who owe so much of their fame to online popularity. McEwan signed her first book deal during the pandemic and is now a bestselling author. (Instagram/@staceymcewanbooks) "Being of any kind of public figure on social media feels a lot like putting your head on a chopping block and just hoping that no one swings the blade," she said. "It's the wild, wild west out there and one certainly does have to be careful." It's up to most authors to run their own social media accounts, promoting their books and interacting with fans while also making sure they don't say or do the wrong thing. Because being 'cancelled' can tank book sales and slash an author's income in an instant and most don't have huge advances or established fortunes to fall back on. "I got an advance for [my first book], but it was a small amount and it certainly wasn't anything that was going to set me up for the future," McEwan said. "I really had to rely on how well the book was going to sell." Back then she had her teaching career to fall back on but that's gone now. While she was still teaching part-time, McEwan landed a global deal with publishing powerhouse Simon & Schuster for her next duology. The advance alone was enough to finance her for a year, so she took unpaid leave from teaching to write A Forbidden Alchemy. The novel follows Nina Harrow and Patrick Colson, childhood friends who find themselves on opposite sides of a war fuelled by class inequality. "I like the idea of the lower classes questioning why it is that they must remain so," McEwan said. McEwan took unpaid leave from teaching to write A Forbidden Alchemy. (Simon & Schuster) Months before it hit shelves, McEwan was told she had to go back to teaching full-time or quit altogether. She chose the latter and so far, it's been the right choice. McEwan just returned from the very successful US leg of her A Forbidden Alchemy book tour and you can walk into bookstores all over Australia and find her name staring back at you from the 'bestseller' shelves. "I have a lot of people that I went to school with, that I used to work with, past teachers, students, [and] employers going, 'what's happening?'" McEwan said. "'Is this you, or is this just someone with your name?' ... those reactions only fuel me." 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7NEWS
an hour ago
- 7NEWS
G Flip's new TikTok series explains Aussie culture staples that shock Americans
Musician G Flip may live in Los Angeles with their wife now, but they're still all about Aussie culture — taking to TikTok to share things from life Down Under they've noticed surprise Americans. The Worst Person Alive singer, born Georgia Flipo, posted a video on Thursday explaining to viewers the iconic Aussie tradition of meat tray raffles. 'So you go to the pub, and you can buy raffle tickets to win a meat tray — and you just win a tray of various meats and sausages, and then you go home with the meat tray,' the singer explained in the video, which has already amassed more than 666,000 views. Loading TikTok Post 'Everyone I've ever told that to who's American can't believe it, they're like what the f***.' The singer explained that the first time their wife, Selling Sunset star Chrishell Stause, came to Australia they had attended a Darwin pub together but failed to take home the tray. Stause was quick to comment about their attempt, saying she wants to win a tray 'even though I know it will give me meat sweats and likely food poisoning'. Other Americans, however, weren't as sold on the idea of a meat tray. 'So, you just carry around a bunch of raw meat for the rest of the night and let it warm up in your famously hot weather?' one stumped American queried. 'As a Texan, I am SHOCKED this is a thing,' another chimed in. Aussies were quick to defend the time-honoured tradition, with even Aussie beer legends Victoria Bitter rallying behind Down Under culture. 'A hard-earned raffle deserves a big cold meat tray,' the brand wrote, earning a like and shocked 'VB!?!' reply from G Flip. 'Winning the meat tray is like winning three million dollars,' another Aussie wrote. Despite shocking Americans with the meat tray, the star wasn't done discussing the cultural divide — following up with a video about pen licenses on Wednesday morning. 'In Australia, when you're like eight or nine — roughly like grade three I think – you do a test to deem if you're ready to upgrade from a pencil to a pen,' the singer explained. Loading TikTok Post 'You've got to make sure (your writing)'s all legible and your letters look great, and then your teacher will grade you and you'll get a certificate that says now you can use your pen — meaning you earned your pen license. 'But apparently Americans, you don't get a pen license and you're out here using pencils until you're in your teens... what?! That's a lot of sharpening,' they joked. Americans, including the musician's wife Stause, were again quick to flood the comments of the videos shocked over the information. 'This cannot be true at all,' Stause commented about the revelation. 'A license?! You mean we're just out here using these things illegally??' a fan said. Another American chimed in with follow-up questions for the singer: 'Can you get it revoked? Who would revoke it?' The Drink Too Much singer is set to begin their Dream Ride tour next month, with a show at the Fremantle Arts Centre lined up for March 2026.
Sydney Morning Herald
an hour ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Peter Carey says he's done writing novels: ‘You have to know when it's enough'
He folds it in quietly, mid-thought, somewhere between a lament about lost notes, a gentle defence of his landline, and reflections on readings. 'See … because I haven't … I've stopped writing novels,' he says, with a hint of hesitation – not quite reluctant, more aware the revelation won't go unremarked. No fuss, no fireworks. Just the quiet confirmation that there won't be another novel from Peter Carey – the only Australian to win the Booker Prize twice, and one of only a handful to win the Miles Franklin three times. 'I didn't think I'd stopped. I had a fear that I might have written all the novels I needed or should write,' Carey, 82, says. 'But I persisted, and tried various things, and threw things away … and in the end I thought, well, that's it.' The boy from Bacchus Marsh became a literary giant, showing Australians a funhouse mirror version of their own history – grotesque, funny, violent, and absurd – and carrying that vision to the world. There have been 14 novels – including Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang, Theft: A Love Story and The Chemistry of Tears – two volumes of short stories, and two travelogues. Books full of mythmakers and tricksters, schemers and fabulists, each one animated by Carey's unmistakable voice – sly, digressive, electric with curiosity. He emerged alongside a transformative generation of Australian writers, but carved a path all his own, refusing to conform, mixing high style with larrikinism, postmodern and postcolonial play with emotional heft. And for decades, the rhythm never faltered. Every few years, like clockwork, a new Carey novel. Then it stopped – and the silence started to feel pointed. Asking a writer how their next novel is going is like asking a magician how the trick works: awkward, disappointing, and you're probably not going to get an invitation back. Now, the question has answered itself. Carey's last novel, A Long Way from Home, was published nearly eight years ago, and he sees it as standing tall among his most meaningful books. It marked a turning point. 'There's a time when you're new to everybody – you do something like Oscar and Lucinda or Illywhacker, and you get hugely noticed. The Kelly Gang, also,' Carey says. 'But A Long Way from Home, which, I think, is as important a thing as I've done… it doesn't sit like that. No one particularly thinks of it as the best thing he's ever done or the most important thing. But I thought it was.' The novel follows a 1950s car race across Australia, but beneath the bonnet is something more volatile: an attempt to grapple with the country's foundational violence, its settler legacy. Carey has long circled Australia's history and national mythology, but in A Long Way from Home, he took it on directly. He wanted to write, as a white Australian, about imperialism and invasion. It felt risky, and he was nervous about how it would land, particularly when he returned to Australia to tour the book. But he felt he pulled it off – or, as he puts it, 'I didn't make a dick of myself.' Carey isn't expecting an orchestra of tiny violins to start playing. There appears to be a straightforward, if perhaps melancholic, acceptance: the more you publish, the less of a fuss it makes. His good friend Tom Keneally once told him that when they were new, everyone thought they were brilliant – now, they're just part of the furniture. 'I think it's true. We all know that from our reading, and from how it feels to discover a writer,' Carey says. 'We tend to be less excited about the third or fourth book, but we were absolutely stunned by the first. That's the way it goes … You have to know when it's enough, too.' As we talk, a bookshelf packed with Carey's novels watches over us. This year marks 35 years since he left Australia for New York – much longer than he ever planned to stay away. He moved there with his second wife, Alison Summers, a theatre-maker and editor, and they had two sons. The marriage ended, but he stayed. Carey says Australians tend to get anxious or angry about those who leave, but he says his thinking and writing have always looked back to home. For years, his old novels were scattered around the Manhattan apartment he shares with his wife, Frances Coady, a book editor and publisher turned agent. After returning from the A Long Way from Home tour, he finally corralled them onto shelves. In front of them, Carey made several attempts at a new novel – two, maybe three, different starts, each hundreds of pages long – but nothing stuck. There was no urgency behind them, no force demanding the work into being. After A Long Way from Home, the compulsion just wasn't there. 'After a while, you develop a lot of skills – you can make things work. But the last thing you want to do is bullshit yourself,' he says. 'You have to ask, do you need to write this? Why are you rewriting and rewriting and rewriting? Because you're trying to find something that isn't there. And that's OK. I mean, I'm 82 years old, for f---'s sake.' There was no ceremonial uncapping of the pen, no dramatic farewell to fiction. Certainly no relief, he says he didn't feel happy about it. It's been about five years now, he guesses, since he called it a day. 'I'm one of those people – this is what I do. And when you can't do that any more… who are you?' he says. 'I mean, I can't even play golf. I'm certainly not going sailing. In the end, you're someone who could do one trick – and that's write.' And that one trick hasn't disappeared. Carey's now working on a non-fiction project – 'enough to keep me off the street,' as he puts it – and while it's a different muscle from fiction, it still scratches an itch. 'I'm engaged in making something and it's a little risky, and it's beyond what I think I know how to do, and that's exciting, right?' The past few years have brought other big changes, too. For nearly two decades, Carey was a distinguished professor and the executive director of the creative writing MFA at public university Hunter College, a program he helped build into one of the country's best, and most competitive courses. Former alumni include Susan Choi, Jennifer Egan, Paul Beatty and Adam Haslett. He left a few years ago. He laughs about the creeping signs of age: forgetting book titles when talking to students, stretching sentences to give himself time to remember. He won't be drawn on the details, but it doesn't sound as though it was the fondest farewell. 'There were ... let's call them administrative issues, shall we? That went on for a couple of years. I resolved them. But I didn't want to deal with any of that ever again,' he says. Those professional shifts come amid a milestone year for Carey: the 25th anniversary of True History of the Kelly Gang, the swaggering Booker-winning novel written in the unpunctuated voice of Australia's most infamous outlaw. Carey is one of five Australian artists commissioned by the State Library of Victoria to contribute to Creative Acts, a new exhibition showcasing 600 artefacts from the library's collection, all exploring the theme of creativity. His piece – a reflection on the 1000 days he spent writing True History of the Kelly Gang – draws on the personal archive he's contributed over the years, including 4000 pages of drafts, marked-up manuscripts, and the chunky 1990s Apple computer he used to write the novel. He's been selling archival material for some time – 'every time I need to pay the school fees,' he jokes. Some of it won't be unsealed until after his death. Asked if there's anything particularly juicy in there, he shoots back: 'Oh, I mean, if I was going to pay back somebody, I'd rather do it while I was alive.' The origin story of True History of the Kelly Gang is almost mythic in itself. Carey, whose parents ran a car dealership in Ballarat and scraped together the funds to send him to Geelong Grammar, flunked his first-year science exams at Monash University. He'd once imagined himself a chemist or a zoologist – until a car crash and some existential drift nudged him into advertising. There, among copywriters who harboured secret literary ambitions, he was introduced to James Joyce, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac and William Faulkner. One day, his colleague Barry Oakley – a former schoolteacher and writer – took him to George's Art Gallery to see Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings. Carey was entranced. He sought out Ned Kelly: Australian Son by Max Brown, and became fixated on the Jerilderie letter, Kelly's 'manifesto', dictated as a defence against what he saw as the relentless persecution from the colonial establishment. Carey transcribed the letter by hand and carried it around 'like the relic of a martyred saint', certain he would one day do something with it. Years passed. There were false starts and failed novels, then critical successes. The letter was lost somewhere along the way. But in 1994, at the age of 51, Carey wandered into the Met in New York and stumbled across Nolan's full suite of 27 Kelly paintings. The vision returned – and this time, he started writing. 'It feels like yesterday really. Well, not quite, but 25 years is sort of shocking. I mean, shit,' he says. The novel was a critical and commercial success, winning the Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and inspiring film adaptations. Yet Carey thinks the final product was very different from what the young man who first dreamt it expected. That writer wanted to go off the deep end of the avant-garde. 'That writer would have thought I was a total sellout. That writer was ridiculous, but charming in his way. But the Kelly Gang was not what he had in mind, and that came slowly over time.' Carey worked closely with high-profile American editor Gary Fisketjon, whom he's long credited for his passion about – and dedication to – the book. Looking back, though, there are a few decisions Carey says he might have made differently. Fisketjon had a view that all the abbreviations and contractions in the novel should follow a consistent pattern. Carey now thinks it should've been messier. Finding Kelly's voice was never difficult for Carey, and he says he could still slip into it now (but he politely declines giving a performance). 'He wanted there to be a rule for things and I agreed with him at the time, but I think it should have been more untidy,' Carey says. 'I mean, I don't think there's anything really many people are going to notice. You would have to be as mad as we were.' Loading Mad is how he thinks about his long history, the books behind him. 'When I think about the books and no I don't sit there pouring over the pages. I think, my god you did that. You were a mad person. You know what I mean? It's sort of like, if you're going to write, you have to move beyond yourself, and you really do have to build a ladder for yourself,' Carey says. 'And that's why writers are always so disappointing to me because when you meet the person, it's the person standing on the floor, not the person who lives up the ladder because the writer got up the ladder one step at a time and got to a place beyond who they are, in a way.' Loading Carey has twice been due to visit Australia recently – including for this year's Sydney Writers' Festival – but has had to cancel both trips. I ask him what a typical day looks like now – innocently, perhaps – and get the kind of answer that suggests I should've known better. 'Well, I clean my teeth. And I take my time with it. My dentist said, you know, don't be in a rush. So I clean my teeth properly. And I have some breakfast, and then I go to my desk and then I do what I'm not telling you about – despite my valiant attempts.' So, there will be another book. Just not a novel. And for those who might feel the absence of one, he offers a kind of gentle redirection. Go back, he says. Reopen what's already on the shelf. 'If you've read a book 10 years ago, when you go back to it, it's a different book. So I'd suggest it's time for them to go on that journey of discovery. I mean I know I'm being glib, on the one hand, but on the other hand, it is really true,' he says. 'And also, it's a real test because some of the things we thought we loved so much, we go back to, and they're not so great any more. And that's disappointing and we realise we've changed. The book hasn't changed – we've changed. And we hope, I would hope to have written a few books that when you go back to them are better than you thought, or at least as good.'
