Elaine Hendrix reveals ‘Parent Trap’ deleted scenes she was ‘really sad to see go’
Not even Meredith Blake clicking sticks could fend off the chopping block.
“The Parent Trap” star Elaine Hendrix revealed two scenes from the 1998 Disney classic that didn’t make the final cut.
In the film, a remake of the 1961 original, twins Hallie Parker and Annie James (Lindsay Lohan) scheme to reunite their divorced parents. Hendrix plays Meredith Blake, the gold-digging fiancée of the girls’ father, Nick Parker (Dennis Quaid).
With a runtime of 2 hours and 8 minutes, Hendrix, 54, said she was surprised any scenes were trimmed at all, noting the movie is already “pretty long, especially for a little bit older of a film.”
“Nowadays, it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s a short movie, in comparison,’” she exclusively told The Post. “But there were two scenes that I was really sad to see go that I remember.”
Among the cut footage, Hendrix said there was a scene of Meredith and Nick shopping for her engagement ring — a moment she called “very near and dear to [her] heart” in a 2020 Vulture interview.
“We shut down Rodeo Drive to shoot it,” she told The Post. “That was a really big deal.”
The “Dynasty” actress also recalled that the late Variety columnist Army Archerd visited the set while they were filming the scene and later wrote about “The Parent Trap.”
“[He] really singled me out and called me a young Carole Lombard,” she told Vulture. “He mentioned how only a group of pros would really be worthy of shutting down Rodeo Drive.”
Because of that moment, Hendrix told The Post, “I was like, ‘Oh, I really wanted that scene in the movie.’”
The second deleted scene Hendrix was disappointed to see cut put a twist on one that actually did make the final cut.
While on a camping trip with Nick and the twins, Meredith starts clicking sticks on her way to the tent.
Quaid, as Nick, asks, “Meredith, what are you doing?” She replies, “I don’t want the mountain lions to —” but stops short when she notices Hallie and Annie giggling.
“There are no mountain lions up here, are there?” she asks.
In the deleted version, Hendrix told The Post that she followed the line with a “pratfall, a trip out of screen, like I fell down.”
A classically trained dancer, Hendrix tries to do as many of her own stunts as possible — and “The Parent Trap” was no exception.
“That one in particular, I was so proud of,” she explained. “[It] felt like it harked back to the Vaudeville days — like, ‘Watch me be so talented.’ And then it got cut, so nobody got to see it.”
She concluded to Vulture, “I was like, ‘Damn, that was a good fall.’”
Credit to Nypost AND Peoples