Interview: Look at Erika Henningsen, She's Sandra Dee in Just in Time

Erika Henningsen, best known for originating the role of Cady Heron in Broadway’s Mean Girls, is back onstage, playing movie star Sandra Dee opposite Jonathan Groff in the Bobby Darin jukebox musical Just in Time. It’s a busy month for Henningsen, who is not only opening the show, but getting ready for the premiere of the new Tina Fey-led Netflix series The Four Seasons, where she plays Ginny, a dental hygienist with a secret. Amid rehearsals, we caught up with Henningsen to discuss her big springtime.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I will say, my knowledge of Sandra Dee begins and ends with “Look at Me, I’m…” What about you?
Yes, nothing. I knew literally nothing. I think I knew her face, because she had that sort of virginal, sweet, old Hollywood face. There’s such an assumption about who she is based on what she looks like, how she presented in movies, and how the studios packaged her.

The thing that is so wild is that she was a true child star. She had been working since she was eight years old. People think of her only as Gidget, but she was number one on the call sheet by the time she was nine. What’s our equivalent of that?

I keep going back to Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things, this child who was handled a massive responsibility, who seems a lot more grown up than the average 23-year-old now because she had to grow up really, really fast. When I was 23, there was no way I could have had the poise and maturity that Sandra Dee had.

And the back half of her life was just brutal.
Brutal. A big part of it was because she got dropped by the studios and she got divorced. That was a scarlet letter for women of that era. When she didn’t have the framework of being on a movie set or being a wife, her life just totally bottomed out. She really didn’t know how to do anything. She’d been raised on film sets, and when she could no longer rely on that, that’s when she turned to drinking and other types of destructive behavior. It’s quite sad.

How is this experience of being back in theater for the first time, I guess, since before Covid?
I’ve been so lucky. I’ve done some television work, I’ve gotten to do animation work that has called upon all the things I love, which is singing, improv. It’s such a commitment to come back and do eight shows a week. You have to like the team you’re working with.

I had been wanting to work with Alex Timbers for a long time. I’d auditioned for him a ton. Jonathan, I was a teenager when he was doing Spring Awakening and he’s always maintained that rock star quality to me. Gracie and I had a friendship because I was listening to Lawrence backstage at Mean Girls. Our music director, Andrew Resnick, is my music director at all the concerts I’ve gotten to do on the road. It’s this very wonderful kismet.

I’m also very grateful to not be number one. It’s beautiful to watch Jonathan do the “don’t leave the stage” track that I had in Mean Girls. I am really delighting in getting handed the ball and then getting to hand that ball back to him. I got to do that with Four Seasons, too. I got to pop in and out.

I was very jealous of you all in Four Seasons, because I wanted to be at all the different locations, too.
We had a delightful experience on that set. We truly enjoyed ourselves. Our last day was in Puerto Rico and Kerry Kenney-Silver, who plays Steve Carell’s wife, and I were walking back to our hotel rooms, and she was like “I kind of forgot that people are going to watch this show. It feels like we’ve just been doing this for us.” It was so fun and devoid of that undercurrent of stress or pressure. We were just having a good time.

At this point, you have such an extensive history with Tina, between Mean Girls and Girls5eva and now The Four Seasons.
Tina has been…I mean, she’s kind of given me everything from a professional standpoint, and a personal standpoint. I met my husband and best friends doing Mean Girls. She and Casey Nicholaw are responsible for it all.

I found the show deeply relatable — there were a couple of scenes with Tina and Will Forte where their neuroses were such that it was like the writers bugged our house. My wife was like, “These are literal conversations that we’ve had.”
Oh, my favorite line in the show is when Will Forte’s character says, “I’m hungry. Is there going to be time to eat?” And Tina goes “You can monitor your own food intake.” I cannot count the amount of times my husband and I have taken a trip and halfway through the day, he gets really fussy and needs to eat something. I’m like, you knew there was going to be no time to stop. Why didn’t you wait?

Oh yeah, I become angry very quickly. It happens very quickly.
It happens very quickly. I just love that the show is about marital relationships. I didn’t really realize this, but there’s not a ton of shows about groups of friends who are in their 50s. You have the 20-somethings who moved to New York and are trying to make it, but people do stay friends into their 50s. And now they have children and divorces and judgement of one another’s spouses. I’m excited for people to not only see themselves in the marriages, but fin the friendships.