Nostalgia is king in the entertainment industry these days. With countless reboots and revamps in and out of the box office and on our television screens, there is something both comforting and whimsical about returning to a past time in our lives. For those of us who came of age in the new millennium, Life Size was a distinct pop culture moment. The film followed an angsty young tween, Casey (Lindsay Lohan), who while mourning her mother, inadvertently brings her Eve fashion doll (Tyra Banks) to life. The plucky Disney tale was supposed to be just another Disney Channel flick at the time, but instead, it became a phenomenon. Now, almost two decades later, Banks has stepped back into Eve’s stilettos for Freeform’s Life Size 2: A Christmas Eve.
This time around, Eve is inadvertently awakened by Grace Manning (grown-ish actress Francia Raisa) — a spoiled twenty-something socialite turned CEO, who has been tasked with taking over her mother’s company Marathon Toys —the same organization that established the Eve dolls.
The sequel to Life Size didn’t come together quickly. Though Banks first announced the film was in development in 2012, the movie was not greenlit until April 2017. Nearly six years after she first began discussing a sequel to Life Size, Shadow and Act sat down to chat with Banks about becoming Eve again, why the sequel is so much sexier than the original, and why she knew Raisa was the right choice to push this film forward.
"It was so exciting to step into the high heeled shoes — the very painful high heeled shoes of Eve after eighteen years," Banks told Shadow and Act.
Knowing how much fans loved the original, and now that the iconic supermodel was on board as an executive producer, she wanted to be confident that she gave Eve and Life Size the reverence that they deserved.
"I wanted to make sure as an executive producer of the sequel to give you all that stuff that you loved about it the first time but switch it up. I wanted to twist it up and also mature it up a little bit so that people who watched Life Size when they were little and are now adults could have something that they could relate to."
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188 Likes, 24 Comments - Aramide Tinubu (@awordwitharamide) on Instagram: "On some supermodel shit with the iconic Tyra Banks. We talked Life Size 2, returning to Eve almost..."