Tagline: Some friends just fit together.
Following freshman year at college, best friends Tibby (Amber Tamblyn), Lena (Alexis Bledel), Carmen (America Ferrera) and Bridget (Blake Lively) find it increasingly difficult to stay in touch. As their lives take different paths, it may take more than a shared pair of well-worn blue jeans to keep their bonds from completely unraveling.
Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, Blake Lively and Alexis Bledel reunite onscreen in “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2” as the lifelong best friends audiences fell in love with three years ago.
Based on Ann Brashares’ best-selling series of novels about four young women who share an unbreakable bond through the unpredictable events of their lives, the new story catches up with Tibby, Carmen, Bridget and Lena in the months following their first year of college.
Having been apart all year, their plans for the summer will take them even further along separate paths as each experiences the freedom, love, choices and challenging life lessons that mark their individual journeys toward adulthood. Now it will take more than a hurried note… or even a treasured pair of pants passed back and forth among them to keep their lives connected.
Feeling displaced at home with her mother expecting a new baby, and disappointed that her friends opted to spend the summer away, Carmen (America Ferrera) accepts a chance invitation to work backstage at a theater festival in Vermont. There, she surprisingly finds herself thrust into the spotlight for the very first time and simultaneously becomes the focus of the play’s handsome young leading man.
Tibby (Amber Tamblyn), remains in New York City to wrap an NYU film project while cautiously taking her relationship with Brian McBrian (Leonardo Nam) to the next level. When an unexpected crisis complicates everything, she must finally face her fear of getting close if she wants to let love in.
Bridget (Blake Lively), still struggling with the loss of her mother and questions about her past, travels to Turkey for an archeological dig before realizing that the truths she needs to uncover are buried closer to home.
And Lena (Alexis Bledel), separated from first love Kostos (Michael Rady) and studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, meets a free-spirited fellow art student (Jesse Williams) who forces her to choose between holding on to her memories or mending her heart and pursuing an exciting new love.
For Tibby, Carmen, Bridget and Lena, communication was always as easy as breathing. Now, new priorities and rapid changes make it harder for them to keep in touch. Messages are sometimes missed… or misunderstood. But when it matters most, they will still reach out to those who know them best. Finding a way to share their experiences as they always have, with heart and humor, they will come to value more than ever the immeasurable power of their friendship.
Production Information
“For as long as I could remember, the four of us shared everything. I believed that the Sisterhood could survive anything. But we had to learn on our own how to become ourselves…without losing each other.” – Carmen
Three years have passed since audiences last saw Tibby, Carmen, Bridget and Lena. They were 16 then, best friends, and just beginning to realize the possibilities that lay beyond the Bethesda neighborhood where they all grew up. That summer marked their first brief separation, as Lena visited her grandparents in Greece, Bridget attended soccer camp, Carmen adjusted to her divorced father’s new household, and Tibby took a local job to fund her first major video project.
To help them keep in touch back then, they relied upon a unique messenger: a pair of vintage jeans, found in a thrift shop, that miraculously fit each of them perfectly and even seemed to bring them luck. They made a pact to mail the pants to one another throughout the summer months, with notes enclosed from each wearer to the next about everything that had happened during the time the pants were in her possession. But things are different now. The issues they face now are more adult and the pace of life is faster.
Producer Denise Di Novi, who was also a producer on the original film, says, “The story picks up after the girls’ first year of college. They have matured; their concerns and relationships are more complicated. We can see how their friendship has changed as they themselves are changing.”
“It’s a classic coming-of-age story, but these are modern 21st-century young women,” says director Sanaa Hamri. “One of the things I like about the story is how authentic it is and age-appropriate. It’s a time of fun and freedom and trying new things, but also a time when we all begin to deal seriously with relationships, self-discovery and confidence. There are often no easy answers to the fundamental questions about who we are and what we want.”
It’s also a time for learning how to stand up for yourself and what you believe in, as the girls will discover. Unexpected events can uncover painful truths or lead in exciting new directions. Strengths and talents emerge. And love-in its myriad forms-is everywhere.
“The ‘Sisterhood’ is popular because it’s so relatable,” observes returning producer Debra Martin Chase. “The movies I like best, and strive to make, are what I call ‘universal in the specific.’ They’re simply about life, with themes that touch people, regardless of gender or generation. This is a story about four young women, but it’s also about the kinds of things we all go through to find ourselves and our place in the world.”
Equally relatable is that fact that, as Carmen, Tibby, Bridget and Lena pursue their chosen paths, they find it increasingly difficult to stay in touch. The subtle disconnection becomes evident in the hurried messages they do exchange. Blake Lively, who stars as Bridget, explains. “Previously, the girls knew every facet of each others’ lives and it took no time to catch up. Now, Tibby will start to tell Carmen something or Lena will break some new development to Bridget and realize they don’t know enough about what’s been going on to put this new information in context. They’re just not in the loop anymore.”
To some extent, that’s a good thing. America Ferrera, who stars as Carmen, suggests, “Sometimes you need to see what you’re capable of accomplishing on your own. It’s time for them to step away from the safety net and find out who they are individually before they can truly appreciate what they have together. It’s scary, but a tremendously exciting prospect.”
Amber Tamblyn, starring in the role of Tibby, agrees. “When I was that age it was a very turbulent time for me and this film reflects exactly my state of mind. ‘Do I really want to do what I’m doing; or do I even know what I’m doing?’ Sometimes you have to spend some time alone with those questions.”
And sometimes these separations, when they occur, become permanent. “If you decide the distance is too much or you’ve grown too far apart, it might be best to let a relationship go. Other times, you fight to keep it,” notes Alexis Bledel, who stars as Lena and whose storyline reveals not only the evolution of her bond with the sisterhood but with her former long-distance love, Kostos.
“The challenge,” offers Chase, “is how to establish independent lives, accommodate change, and still hold on to each other. That’s the challenge of any relationship and ultimately marks the difference between associations of the moment and ones that stand the test of time.”
This dichotomy shapes the film’s structure. “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2” relates Carmen’s, Tibby’s, Bridget’s and Lena’s stories as parallel lines that cross and re-cross throughout-a feat of style, logistics and, remarks producer Broderick Johnson, “expert pacing. The stories have to balance one another, connect and separate organically in a way that makes you feel that you’re watching one continuous flow rather than four independent vignettes.”
Essentially, says Di Novi, “It’s five stories, because you have each of the girls’ individual dramas contained the larger framework that holds together and them in the same direction. In adapting the novels, we had to be very judicious about what to include and what to omit. We tried to select the moments that best defined each character. What are their primary struggles? What are the highlights in their lives?”
Screenwriter Elizabeth Chandler, a writer on the original film in 2005, drew upon volumes two, three and four of Ann Brashares’ award-winning and internationally best¬selling book series for the sequel, with an emphasis on the fourth, Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood, which brings the friends to precisely this point. “It was decided that the new film would jump three years forward, after the girls had spent a year living very separate lives at different colleges. This allowed us to explore more mature issues and dramatize how the girls deal with these problems while the bonds of their friendship are beginning to unravel,” she says.
“However, in trying to craft the most compelling storylines for each character, I incorporated certain dramatic elements from all three books that were particularly meaningful. For example, I adjusted the Turkey sequence to culminate in Bridget’s realization that she has unresolved questions to pursue elsewhere, which then takes her to her grandmother’s home in Alabama. By combining plotlines from the second and the fourth books, I was able to enhance Bridget’s overall arc within the time span of the movie.”
Developing the script was a collaborative process involving at times not only the director and producers but also input from the four lead actresses.
Says Hamri, “Our goal was to satisfy the fans of the original movie and the books and, at the same time, create a self-contained saga for an audience that may not have seen ‘The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants’ or know the books. That really is the job of a sequel. I knew we had a tough act to follow. But I also knew that these characters had been so well-developed and presented with such honesty that it was clear to see they had a future.”
“They really have a life of their own,” says producer Kira Davis. “After the first movie, I believe we felt that these characters deserved to live on and, as filmmakers, we approached the sequel with as much anticipation as fans. We wanted to see what these women were going to do next.”
And the pants? Well… Maybe it never really was about the pants. The Sisterhood… and Significant Others. “Of course, we would never have considered a sequel without the four actresses who introduced these wonderful characters to audiences everywhere,” states Chase, echoing the sentiments of her colleagues.
As life often imitates art, the four young women who met on the set of the first film struck a genuine rapport and have remained friends off-camera since that production wrapped, in their own way reinforcing the “Sisterhood” principle even as their film, stage and television careers keep them very busy and take them around the globe.
Says Di Novi, “I’ve made many films over the past 20 years and rarely have I seen the kind of chemistry that these women create together.”
“The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2” reunites the foursome with key characters from the first film while introducing several important new ones, expanding the term “significant others” beyond its standard romantic application to include a wide range of influential people in their lives-family members, mentors and new friends. Not that there isn’t plenty of romance…
Audiences will recognize two familiar handsome faces: Lena’s love Kostos, and Tibby’s longtime boyfriend Brian McBrian. These young men have also progressed in the ensuing three years on their own trajectories toward adulthood, and returning stars Michael Rady and Leonardo Nam convey that deeper maturity in their roles.
Help, as well as heartache, continues to spring from new and unpredictable sources and every encounter has the potential to help define Carmen, Tibby, Bridget and Lena as the women they are becoming.
America Ferrera as Carmen
After a year at Yale, Carmen has kept pace with her classes but finds her personal life less manageable. Still not sure what she wants to do with her future, she returns to Bethesda with high hopes of reuniting with the sisterhood and is crushed to learn they’ve all made other plans for the summer. Her mother, played again by Rachel Ticotin, has recently remarried and is now simultaneously preparing for the birth of a baby and moving to a new house, her happiness adding poignantly to Carmen’s sense of displacement and disconnection.
“Carmen accepts an invitation from Julia, a drama student she knows at Yale, to work backstage at a theater over the summer because she really has nothing else to do,” says America Ferrera. “But she’s surprised at how much she grows there.”
To her amazement, and with some trepidation, Carmen is cast as the lead in Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale” and discovers a dormant passion for acting. At the same time, she shyly captures the attention of her charming leading man, Ian, played by British actor Tom Wisdom.
Ian’s genuine affection encourages Carmen to shine on stage. But it’s the demanding nature of her mercurial director that will test her confidence and conviction like never before and, consequently, lead Carmen to consider whether this accidental turn of events is just a pleasant diversion or possibly a bold new direction for her life.
Interestingly, notes Hamri, “It is not Carmen’s success on stage or Ian’s flattering overtures that empower her as much as it is Julia’s aggressively jealous reaction to these triumphs and the subsequent steps Carmen must make to stand up for herself.”
Rachel Nichols, who plays Julia, points out that the role is not that of a simple villain or merely a foil for Carmen-a testament to the attention given each character by Ann Brashares and translated to the screen by Chandler. “Julia is a real person with her own problems and, though she behaves hideously, she is not completely devoid of good qualities. It’s possible that Julia might even learn something from this experience… although, clearly, it is Carmen’s moment of revelation.”
Amber Tamblyn as Tibby
Meanwhile, Tibby has been honing her talent for documentary filmmaking at NYU, while, in typical Tibby fashion, offering her hilariously razor-sharp movie reviews to bewildered patrons at the East Village video store where she works part-time.
“People are always remarking on Tibby’s sense of humor, which is stellar, but a large part of her sarcasm and humor is just to deflect attention from her feelings,” Amber Tamblyn observes. “It was fine when she was younger but she’s come to a point where it could really hold her back from experiencing life.”
Tibby has also been falling in love-though she’d never admit it-with her formerly platonic friend and fellow videophile Brian McBrian, whom we met in the first film. Now, as Chase says, “It’s the real deal.”
Unfortunately, taking their relationship to the next level results in a crisis that not only mars the emotional delicacy of the moment but could separate them for good, throwing Tibby into a tailspin of panic and self-recrimination.
Says Hamri, “It’s traumatic, but something young people often go through in relationships.”
Leonardo Nam, returning as the straightforward and sensitive Brian, points out, “Just as the girls have matured, left high school and are navigating their way in the world, so Brian has grown up. He’s not the awkward video-game playing geek we first met. Although they’re both freaked out by what’s happening, their reactions are different: Brian is focused on working things out, but Tibby’s impulse is to shut him out.”
That, as her friends would attest, is typical Tibby behavior.
Notes Chase, “Tibby has never been a person who lets others get close, and this is a crucial juncture at which she’ll either come to a deeper understanding of what love and intimacy are all about or she’ll shut door and stay where she is. It’s a journey of maturity for her.”
Alexis Bledel as Lena
Three years ago, budding artist and shy soul Lena had a near-storybook romance with the charismatic Kostos, a young Greek student she met while visiting her grandparents in Santorini. Though their brief connection was heartfelt, it proved difficult to sustain miles away from the Mediterranean.
Says Alexis Bledel, “Lena and Kostos had real feelings for each other, but the distance was too great. It was too much to ask, and Lena finally ended it for both their sakes, though it broke her heart. At this point, she claims to have moved on, but it’s clear that she has not been very successful at putting Kostos out of her thoughts.”
Michael Rady, who made his feature film debut as Kostos in “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” in 2005, believes that anyone who has attempted a long-distance relationship will relate. “It’s not easy being an ocean apart from your love. To make things worse, following Lena’s decision, Kostos had a romantic tryst with someone from the village and did the honorable thing-as befits his character-by marrying her. It’s a tragic blow to Lena when she finds out.”
Lena pretends everything is fine and immerses herself in her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. Beginning the summer with a figure-drawing class, she gets the chance to prove that she has, in fact, moved on when she makes an impression on her striking model and fellow art student, Leo, a free spirit unlike anyone she has ever met.
Their meeting is one of Hamri’s favorite scenes. “It’s so unexpected when Lena finds out that Leo is the model. It’s one of the funniest moments in the movie and so aptly illustrates how different they are. Her reactions are priceless, so natural; she’s completely embarrassed, and his nonchalance is equally priceless because, to Leo, this is nothing unusual. It’s who he is.”
Jesse Williams makes his feature film debut in “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2” as Leo, whom he describes as “confident without arrogance, happy, a guy who is fully at ease in his own skin. Unlike Lena, his uninhibited approach to life also makes him comfortable flowing in and out of relationships in a way that is foreign to her.”
Lena’s interest in Leo and her curiosity about his lifestyle marks a significant turning point, notes Hamri. “Will she adapt herself to his easygoing nature and see where it takes her, or will she remain true to herself even if it means missing an enticing opportunity for romance?”
As Lena struggles to sort out her feelings and values, Bridget learns how her mother’s history affects her own future, Tibby faces the risks and rewards of love, and Carmen gains focus through new challenges, the Sisterhood strives to keep in touch.
The pants-their old messenger imbued with so much of the optimism and magic of their young lives-continue to make the four-point circuit although, now, there is often no time for an accompanying note.
“The pants have a more subtle presence this time around,” notes Hamri, who cites one scene that indicates how the girls’ perspective on their former touchstone and good luck charm has changed. “Carmen is going through a particularly stressful period at the theater camp. When her roommate Julia notices the pants that she has earlier tossed into a corner, Carmen dismisses them with an impatient, ‘Oh, they’re just an old pair of jeans.'”
Still, the director adds, “Whether they know it or not, these young women are not finished with this pair of pants. The pants still have one very important message to deliver.”
Blake Lively as Bridget
Bridget also has difficulty getting close, although in her case the situation is complicated because the person she yearns most to know is the mother she lost years ago and whose memory is rarely acknowledged by her taciturn father-a role played, for the second time, by Blake Lively’s own father, Ernie Lively.
Says the actress, “In the first film, Bridget is just running away from her problems. By the end, and with the help of her friends, she is able to recognize this enough to begin talking about it, which is a phenomenal breakthrough but still far from a solution. In this film, we see her really start to face things head-on. It takes a lot of strength.”
The new story finds Bridget poised between her first year at Brown University and an excursion to Turkey as a student volunteer on an archeological dig. As usual, Bridget is on the move; her physicality conveniently shifting focus and energy away from introspection.
In the brief time she spends at home, she makes the stunning discovery of a box of decade-old letters addressed to her from her maternal grandmother, Greta-letters Bridget never received or even dreamt existed. After a heated confrontation, Bridget’s father explains that by diverting these messages he had hoped to spare his young daughter the pain of being reminded of her loss. But Bridget does not see it the same way and leaves for Turkey in a tumult of emotion.
Once on site, excavating the bones and relics of a domestic Hellenic household, Bridget realizes her avid interest in uncovering the past goes deeper than the academic. “While reconstructing the daily lives of an unknown, centuries-old family, she is finally able to understand that what she needs to dig up and examine are the details of her own past,” states Kira Davis.
A candid encounter with the insightful professor leading the dig, played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, helps Bridget realize what she must do and returns her to the U.S. to track down the grandmother she barely remembers.
Blythe Danner, who stars as the patient and loving Greta, believes, “Both women are drawn to one another by their heartbreak and by the same need to talk about Bridget’s mother: one to ask the questions and the other to provide the answers.”
A Broad Canvas
“The movie covers a lot of ground,” says Di Novi, referring not only to emotional growth but, quite literally, to miles. Concurrent storylines scatter the four friends to Alabama, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Maryland and Turkey before delivering them, all together, to the spectacularly beautiful Greek island of Santorini. “It’s a broad canvas; rich and exciting in many ways.”
In the first film, the pants began their summer journey in Santorini, the most distant of the locales visited. Likewise, production on “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2” began in the Greek Islands, revisiting some of those original sets and vistas, such as the home of Lena’s grandparents and the place where, three years ago, she met Kostos.
Production designer Gae Buckley, who also made the return trip for the “Sisterhood” sequel, says “The family’s cliff-side home and café were the same sites used in the first film. We reproduced the exterior construction and dressing and then created a brand new bedroom in a nearby location for the girls to sleep in.”
Picturesque Amoudi Bay, in Oia, is the place where passenger boats disembark and where the four young women hire burros to navigate the steep trail up to the house. The production team artfully rearranged existing boats in the harbor, replaced modern signage with more subdued graphics, and dressed the entire area in lush greens with an overall focus, says Buckley, “on making it appear less touristy and more like a traditional small fishing village.”
From there, they selected another Greek locale with contrasting topography to stand in for the archeological dig Bridget attends in Turkey. The excavation set was built from scratch in four weeks, modeled on existing dig sites from the Hellenic period in both Greece and Turkey, and proved convincing enough to warrant approval from local archeologists.
Production then moved to the U.S., where various spots in Connecticut served as a range of East Coast cities. Carmen’s Vermont theater world was created from portions of Connecticut, including the KenMont Camp for Boys, the University Theater at Yale in New Haven and the Westport Country Theatre. Bridget’s Bethesda home was shot in Bridgeport and her grandmother’s suburban Alabama property in Stamford. Exteriors of Lena at the Rhode Island School of Design campus were captured at Western Connecticut State University. Tibby’s world was filmed in New York City, from the Weinstein Building at NYU and Washington Square Park to familiar East Village restaurants Two Boots and Yaffa’s Café.
By far, the scenes the four stars shared in Santorini were their favorites. And among these, a highlight was the burro ride-not only for the breathtaking perspective of the Santorini harbor it offers and the playful humor it catches on screen, but for the fact that it reunited them in a place that stirred such wonderful memories of their first “Sisterhood” experience.
Says Bledel, “It’s very natural when the four of us get together. It’s a jumble of noise and nonsense so we don’t really have to work very hard on getting that element across in the story’s lighter scenes where we’re all laughing and having a great time.”
Adds Lively, “It’s chaos. We get along way too well and sometimes things just happen.”
Illustrating this point perfectly is another cast favorite, the cliff-diving scene in Santorini, a purely spontaneous moment away from the cameras that was then incorporated into the story at their suggestion-and with Hamri’s enthusiastic support. While enjoying some downtime on a stroll around the village one day prior to filming, the actresses spotted three boys taking turns leaping into the ocean from a rocky perch. The boys were fans. After talking awhile about the movie, they invited guests to give the dizzying high-dive a try.
Recalls Ferrera, “I was the first to say ‘no way! I’m not jumping!’ But they talked us into it and it really was exhilarating.”
“We did it five times in a row,” says Tamblyn, who cannot resist teasing Ferrera by adding, “When we were recreating it for the film, America and I were supposed to jump together but she was being a wuss and didn’t go,” she laughs. “I didn’t realize it until I was underwater and looking around for her. She scared me half to death. I was afraid she hit a rock.”
“To me,” Hamri concludes, “Carmen, Tibby, Bridget and Lena leaping from that cliff is about them feeling free-with life, and with each other. It’s very symbolic. They’ve all faced their various difficulties and we know there will be more to come because that’s life. But for that moment they can just have fun and be girls again, laugh and scream and let it all go. They take the plunge one at a time and in their own way. But, at the same time, they are all together.”
Production notes provided by Warner Bros. Pictures
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
Starring: Alexis Bledel, America Ferrera, Blake Lively, Amber Tamblyn, Jesse Williams, Rachel Nichols, Shohreh Aghdashloo
Directed by: Sanaa Hamri
Screenplay by: Elizabeth Chandler
Release Date: August 8th, 2008
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature material and sensuality.
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $43,908,061 (100.0%)
Foreign: —
Total: $43,908,061 (Worldwide)