Elaine Hendrix and Lisa Ann Walter’s Friendship Through the Years

Elaine Hendrix and Lisa Ann Walter’s Parent Trap characters may not have been on the same page, but the pair’s real-life friendship has stood the test of time.

Hendrix and Walter connected while filming 1998’s The Parent Trap. Walter played Chessy, nanny to Hallie (Lindsay Lohan), while Hendrix portrayed Meredith, the girlfriend of Haillie’s father (Dennis Quaid). While their characters were at odds in the beloved film, their off-screen dynamic blossomed into a beautiful and long-lasting friendship.

“I feel like that happens sometimes on projects, like you just find someone that you really like, and you get along with them. And that’s who you want to hang with. She was that for me during the project,” Walter said of her and Hendrix’s friendship in a September 2023 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “But then when you know that it’s more, is when you keep hanging out after the project ends, and that’s what we did.”

Since The Parent Trap, Hendrix and Walter have remained close. The pair have supported each other at various public events, including award shows and charity galas. When Hendrix joined the cast of Dancing With the Stars in season 34, Walter was in the audience to support her pal during the live shows.

Keep scrolling for Hendrix and Walter’s complete friendship timeline:

1998

While Walter and Hendrix saw each other in passing during the audition process, they didn’t officially meet until the first day of filming. The Abbott Elementary star recalled how she asked Hendrix if she wanted to join her for lunch.

“One of us, probably me, asked if she wanted to go to Marie Callender’s, because I wanted to eat pie. I was in Chessy-core clothing — what the kids now call Chessy-core. So Elaine had a salad. I ate a pie,” Walter told EW in September 2023. “But we did not leave the table for … it had to have been four hours. And then [she] came back to the room. And we talked for another couple of hours. It was like a long first friendship date, where we got all the info.”

June 2008