The denim sported by The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is downright vintage at this point.
The film about four friends who share a pair of magical jeans that keep them bonded, even when separated by summer vacation, has been making its way in the world since June 1, 2005. And just as a good pair of jeans never goes out of style, the 20-year-old movie—based on the popular YA novel by Ann Brashares—remains a fan favorite, as does its 2008 sequel. Meanwhile, stars Blake Lively, Alexis Bledel, America Ferrera and Amber Tamblyn have sustained their own sisterhood IRL.
Take, for instance, when Ferrera scored an Oscar nomination for Barbie. “They FaceTimed me as a group right away,” she told Variety in 2024. “It was hilarious and funny and emotional, and it’s wonderful to be celebrated and held up by my sisters.”
Ferrera added, “These women who I’ve had the honor of growing up with in this industry and being loved and cheered on and supported by them,” Ferrera said. “Which we all do for each other. They’re amazing, and such a gift in my life.”
While talk of trilogy was all the rage for awhile—”We would love to get paid to hang out with each other,” Ferrera quipped to E! News in 2017—the four actresses now have eight kids among them, so the sisterhood would also have to travel with tote bags and snacks.
“Family makes it hard,” Tamblyn, who shares an 8-year-old daughter with husband David Cross, acknowledged on SiriusXM’s Pop Culture Spotlight in 2022. “Life makes it hard.”
But tales of BFFs supporting each other through thick and thin are timeless, so no one has ever said never.
Yet even making this breath of fresh cinematic air two decades ago came with its challenges.
Just as is the case when any popular book makes the leap from page to screen, there’s a process. And there were a few actresses who almost made it into the cast but ultimately weren’t the right fit.
While there’s still no real explanation for how the magical pants work—as Bledel’s character Lena said, it’s “scientifically impossible”—here’s a pocketful of secrets about The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants:
Why Pants?
“I think pants have unique qualities, especially in a woman’s life,” The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants author Ann Brashares told BookBrowse of how she devised the novel’s conceit, a magical pair of jeans that fits four friends of differing sizes. “Whatever bodily insecurities we have, we seem to take out on our pants. In high school, my friends would have their skinny pants and their fat pants. I like pants that allow women not to judge their bodies. The Traveling Pants are the kind of pants that always love you.”
And she got the idea for the book when she was working as an editor and a colleague told her about sharing a pair of pants with her friends one summer.
“She told me the pants had sadly been lost in Borneo,” Brashares said. “My mind was immediately filled with all sorts of wonderful possibilities.”
Writers’ Room
After reading Brashares’ 2001 novel, producer Debra Martin Chase was in on bringing the coming-of-age tale to the big screen.
Warner Bros. senior executive Kevin McCormick suggested they get Delia Ephron to adapt the script, so Chase and the prolific writer holed up for a week at a Beverly Hills hotel to map out the movie, after which Ephron headed back to New York to get to work.
“Her first draft comes in, and it’s great,” Chase said on a February 2024 episode of the Hollywood Gold podcast, “and all of a sudden we have a blinking green light.”
That Certain Something
Ephron, whose other film credits include You’ve Got Mail, is acclaimed all on her own, but when she tackled the screenplay for SOTTP, she did consult a fellow expert in the field of romantic-comedy timing, onscreen friendships and crackling dialogue: Her older sister and frequent collaborator, When Harry Met Sally writer-director Nora Ephron.
As Good as It Gets
Helen Hunt, who at the time had directed a few episodes of her NBC sitcom Mad About You, was among those in consideration to direct the film, Chase said on Hollywood Gold, recalling how the Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress was looking to build her resume behind the camera.
But eventual SOTTP director Ken Kwapis’ vision blew her away: “He talked about how American Graffiti was the defining movie of his life, as a person, as a man, and had inspired him to be a filmmaker,” Chase shared. “He talked about the ways in which Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants could parallel American Graffiti, and I was like, ‘OK, he’s in my head, he gets this movie, I’m done.’”
“I Am Not a Teenage Girl”
When Kwapis met with the producers, he started with the fact that he couldn’t really identify with what any of the four female protagonists in the film would be going through.
“I opened my pitch by announcing, ‘I am not a teenage girl,’” he wrote in his 2020 memoir What I Really Want to Do Is Direct, noting the story “was aimed squarely at a demographic to which I clearly don’t belong. I was certain that chief among the producer’s concerns was: Why should we hire a guy in his forties to direct a film about teenage girls?”
Therefore, he took it upon himself to highlight the universal themes in the story, such as the grief Bridget is experiencing in the wake of her mother’s death and her questionable decision-making in her quest to fill the void.
As he wrote, “Giving Bridget’s story a broader emotional context convinced my listeners that having ‘teen cred’ was not as important as knowing how to put truthful human behavior on the screen.”
The Sisterhood Takes Shape
“The four girls were so well-drawn, so distinctive,” Chase said, “that everybody had somebody to identify with.” And as the Princess Diaries producer knew, casting would be everything when it came to bringing the pals’ denim-is-thicker-than-blood bond to life.
America Ferrera was cast first as Carmen in 2003, according to Chase. But getting the rest of the gang together was a more painstaking process.
They offered the role of Lena to Gilmore Girls star Alexis Bledel, but she passed, so they planned to go with Smallville’s Kristin Kreuk. Meanwhile, Mischa Barton—who was 17 and still months away from the premiere of The O.C.—was going to play Bridget.
As Fate Would Have It
And then the business of Hollywood got in the way. Chase had a deal with Disney at the time, she explained on Hollywood Gold, and two of three movies the studio was planning to make with Hilary Duff were “earmarked” for the producer. Meanwhile, Duff was attached to a spec script for something called A Cinderella Story that ended up being sold to Warner Bros. without being shopped first to Disney.
Walt Disney Studios’ then-chairman Dick Cook was “apoplectic,” Chase said, and he ended negotiations with Duff, so Chase no longer had two films with the Lizzie McGuire star on her slate. And then, she recalled, “Warner Bros. is like, ‘Well, we don’t want to have too many girl movies at one time. We have to make the Cinderella Story movie this summer, so we need to wait a year for Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.’ So, over a weekend I’m, like, screwed.”
Stitching the Sisterhood Together
But the soft prep continued and Amber Tamblyn—then starring on the critically acclaimed CBS drama Joan of Arcadia—came onboard to play aspiring filmmaker Tibby. However, Smallville and The O.C. had become cultural phenomena, so it was back to the drawing board to find Lena and Bridget after Kreuk and Barton became “not really available,” Chase said.
Luckily, Bledel reconsidered, nailed her audition and was able to make it work with her Gilmore Girls schedule. And in the meantime they “saw everybody,” Chase said, including Kaley Cuoco, Alexis PenaVega, Missy Peregrym and Olivia Wilde, who was on the “short list” for Bridget.
The actress who played Bridget had to be “gorgeous, but in a pure way,” Chase explained. “You have to believe she was a virgin, she wasn’t caught up in her looks. And she had to be able to act! Her mother dies, that role had a lot of depth. We literally had seen everybody who was possibly right. And we told the casting director, ‘You’ve got to go back out there, we haven’t found her.’”
Lookin’ Lively
When 15-year-old Blake Lively auditioned, showing up with a head shot that was “completely blank,” Chase recalled, because she “had never worked,” they knew they had their Bridget.
But the studio had reservations because she was so young and inexperienced, so “we brought in Olivia Wilde, Missy Peregrym and Blake in the final audition,” Chase continued. “It was Blake’s role.”
Sliding Doors
Lively had been planning to go to Stanford for as long as she could remember, but scoring the role of Bridget “kind of just took my life on a different detour,” the L.A. native told MTV News in 2005.
Sisterhood was “an amazing first job,” Lively told Ben Affleck, who directed her in The Town, for Interview in 2010. “And all I had to do was miss finals at school? So I thought, ‘Well, this is great. I’ll just try out acting and see if I like it.’ I missed my finals, I was away shooting for the summer, and I came back home. But rather than pursue acting, I decided that I wanted to finish out my senior year. I thought I’ll finish high school and then I’ll hold off going to college for a year and just try it. But here I am still acting. Things worked out all right.”
Casting Kostos
Chase thought she knew who was going to play Kostos, the local boy Lena falls head over heels for when she visits her grandparents in Greece for the summer.
He “looked like a prince,” the producer said on Hollywood Gold of the unnamed heartthrob who, unfortunately, got away after he was accepted into the London School of Dramatic Arts.
“We were devastated,” Chase admitted, after which they got on with what she called “Santorini Idol,” i.e. the search for the next Kostos. Alcon Entertainment flew in three potential mates for Lena (otherwise it was watching auditions on VHS tapes FedExed to Santorini from the U.S.) and “at the absolute last minute” they went with Michael Rady.
“Just a lovely human being,” Chase said, noting that they kept in touch after the Sisterhood movies and she recruited him for a 2021 episode of The Equalizer, on which she’s an executive producer.
Paper Pusher
Kwapis also kept busy during the year he had free when production was postponed: He directed the pilot of the American adaptation of The Office (as well as the classic first season episode “Diversity Day”), and has been credited time and again for helping set the tone of the entire cult-classic series.
“The night before we start shooting Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” Chase shared, “he gets a call that they’ve been picked up for series.”
But Kwapis—who directed 11 more episodes of The Office—focused on the matter at hand on Santorini, where they spent a month filming Lena’s storyline, and truly earned the title of world’s best boss.
Dress Rehearsal
Since the film’s four stars hadn’t known each other at all before being cast as BFFs, Kwapis came up with some activities to help jumpstart the feeling that they were lifelong friends.
“One was, I gave each of the four actors $75, and I instructed them to go to a thrift store in Vancouver where we were shooting, and their job was to buy something in character and to advise the others about what they should buy in character,” the director told Entertainment Weekly ahead of SOTTP’s 20th anniversary in 2025.
“I didn’t go with them, but the four actors came back and they reported that it was a remarkable bonding experience for them, during which they developed a kind of great shorthand that they used in their few scenes together.”
Tailor Made
The pants logging all those frequent flier miles are a pair of secondhand Levi’s, which are now preserved in the Levi Strauss & Co. Archives.
And not to break the spell or anything, but many pairs of jeans played the one magical pair, each one tailored perfectly for whichever actress was wearing the pants.
“I tried to stage it to make it look as natural as possible,” Kwapis told EW of the scene where they realize these aren’t ordinary jeans. “Blake has the pants, she takes them off and hands them to America, and there’s nothing obviously magical going on. There’s nothing that’s going to signal that a magical event is happening. America just puts them on and they fit. There was a little movie magic going on, obviously, a little bit of sleight of hand, but there was no fancy VFX. It was kind of an old school trickery, and I’m very proud of that scene.”
Set Dressing
While the production did spend a week in Cabo San Lucas to get the exterior scenes for Bridget’s stay at a scenic soccer camp in Mexico, the camp was built entirely in Kamloops, British Columbia—and the whole waterfront was courtesy of CGI.
A Good Bonding Experience
SOTTP author Brashares wasn’t involved in the movie “in any official capacity,” she told Writers Digest in 2008, but Kwapis and the producers “were very welcoming and sweetly solicitous of my opinion, although they were no way bound to take it.”
Overall, she said, “It ended up being a very happy experience. I enjoyed being involved in the publicity and the promotion efforts, which I was happy to do because I really did enjoy the movie; I think they did a great job.”
Brashares noted it was also eye-opening to see the effort involved to bring a detail that might be innocuous on the page—like a rainy night—to life onscreen.
You make these “little, arbitrary decisions as a writer,” she explained, “and you actually see them try to do it on the screen and oh, how expensive and labor intensive every single thing is. It’s a lot easier to write.”
Why the Pants Have Fit So Many Fans
“I think sometimes those tween girl films are not very great, they’re not very sincere,” Tamblyn told the Canadian Press in 2018, explaining why—on the flip side—SOTTP (one and two) worked so well.
Aside from being legit good movies, Tamblyn credited the films’ popularity to the enduring friendship she shares with Lively, Bledel and Ferrera. “I think people really love that,” she said, “this idea that you can—much like women have such deep, complicated relationships with their girlfriends, that the four of us really have that in real life, and that it is kind of this strange sisterhood.”
And they’re not one-size-fits-all, either.
“Some of us have nothing in common,” Tamblyn added. “Like, Blake is a guru of Louboutin shoes. She can figure out how to put an outfit together in two seconds. She’s so immaculate and good at doing that, and I am utterly clueless. I will send her texts of pictures of outfits and be like, ‘Should I wear this?’ She’s like, ‘No, please don’t wear that. Don’t wear cowboy boots with that, we’re not doing that today.’ But the fact that we love each other and we’re so close, I think it’s what people really bond with about the film.”
No Gossip Girls Here
There’s simply no dirt to be found about the making of SOTTP.
“When I did Sisterhood, I had the greatest experience anyone can ever imagine,” Lively said in February 2024 on Tamblyn’s Substack video series Further Ado. “In an industry that often pits women against each other, [we] defied the rules.”
Milestone Moments
While the rumors that her SOTTP costars were godmothers to Lively’s daughter James turned out to not be true, they have shared some serious firsts.
Tamblyn was present when Lively first auditioned for the role of Bridget, and Lively “was the first person (after my husband) to hold my daughter in the hospital after she was born,” the Further Ado host said in a statement when Lively was a guest. “Blake is an ever-curious, playful, joyful soul, and I’m thrilled people will get to experience the depths of a friendship that we have cultivated and nourished for more than two decades.”
Where Are They Now? (Book Series Spoiler Alert…)
Talk of making a third Sisterhood film has dwindled in recent years (though, for the record, Chase said on Hollywood Gold in 2024 that she’d still love to make another one and Kwapis told EW in 2025 he remained “hopeful” it would happen). But Brashares has had thoughts about what happened to Lena, Carmen and Bridget years after the final book in the series, Sisterhood Everlasting, came out in 2011 (and, sob, sent Tibby off into the heavenly sunset).
In that last book, “there’s a sense that they were really laying down roots,” the author told Teen Vogue in 2017. “And they’re finding out ways to lay down roots and have them intertwine in each other’s lives. So they’re starting to set up families, and make a second generation of little ones. I see that continuing. I think I set a lot of that in motion at the end of that last book.”
