SPOILERS are ahead for the ending of Freakier Friday.
Now that the Freakier Friday release is here, it’s time to start unpacking all the fun developments to the characters in the sequel. When I had the chance to talk to Chad Michael Murray during the Los Angeles press junket for Freakier Friday, I asked the actor about one element concerning Jake that I had only theorized might serve as unfinished business after the first movie.
In the latest of the 2025 movie releases, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan once again play mother/daughter pair Tess and Anna Coleman. But this time around they swap bodies with two teenagers (one of them being Anna’s daughter), who decide to use their time as adults to break up her upcoming marriage that would make them sisters. That brings Chad Michael Murray’s Jake back into the picture, as a way to use Anna’s high school sweetheart to break them up. Here’s what Murray said about the development:
When originally [the sequel] came to me, I sat down and I was talking with Kristen Burr, one of our producers, and I just said, well, ‘Let’s talk about Jake just because it’s been 22, 23 years. Like, what has he been doing?’ And in my head, I had just always thought that he probably had a shrine to Tess sitting somewhere in his house. That he had just a little bit of crazy just kind of tucked away inside of his heart and he just could never get that part out of his body.
In the hilarious record store scene that had been teased in the latest trailer, Harper and Lily (who are in Anna and Tess’s body) try to flirt with Jake, but rather than him still having the hots for his high school sweetheart, he’s still blushing over Jamie Lee Curtis’ character. As Murray shared, he always imagined he was still secretly in love with her, and even had a shrine dedicated to her. As he continued in our interview:
And I just loved that about it, because no matter what, she’s just cool. And even at the end of the movie when he says, ‘I see your mom, and I like her… mean, I don’t like her like her, but you know what I mean?’ Like that whole scene at the, wow, I can’t believe I remembered that. But she’s still just so cool, right? Jamie just walks with a cool vibe. And so I think Jake’s just had an affection for her and that’s where it came from. So we sat down and I said, ‘Let’s play with that.’
While I had initially seen Jake and Tess’ chemistry as Jake and Anna falling for each other, just in the wrong body, as I’ve watched the movie over the years, I’ve noticed that he and Anna really didn’t fit as well as when he was with her mom. I absolutely love that in the sequel they decide to explore that he really felt the magic with Tess, and it was her that he was really interested in all along. Murray advocated it himself, and it’s a really funny bit for the sequel to have in it.
The cherry on top? It’s when he arrives at Anna’s wedding at the end with a woman that is dressed exactly like Tess from the first movie.
It’s certainly successful in providing fan service. We gave it a 4 out of 5 stars in our Freakier Friday review, and it’s expected to have a solid opening weekend at the box office. During our exclusive interview with Murray, he also talked about filming that Britney Spears scene when he was 19.
