17 ‘The Parent Trap’ Cast and Crew Members Share Behind-the-Scenes Stories (Exclusive)

It was a beautiful November day at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, interrupted only by the continuous shout and splash of Dennis Quaid crashing into the pool.

“Poor Dennis went in and out of that pool for 4 days in an Armani suit that shrank the second he went in,” The Parent Trap director Nancy Meyers said in the film’s director’s commentary.

Now, 27 years later, she tells PEOPLE that Quaid’s willingness to do it over and over again has always stuck with her.

“Dennis was very game to fall into the pool a few times in a row, which meant drying off, changing and taking another spill,” she says. “He was just wonderful to work with.” 

The cast and crew of the iconic 1998 remake of the beloved 1961 original were nearing the end of their months-long shoot and finally filming the titular trap scene, where Quaid’s Nick is so stunned by seeing Natasha Richardson’s Elizabeth that he takes an epic trip and falls into the hotel’s pool. 

In what was Meyers’ directorial debut, Lindsay Lohan also made her triumphant first splash on the big screen, new motion control technology was used to its most perfect potential and the set was filled with friends and family, including Meyers and producer Charles Shyer’s two daughters, the real-life Annie and Hallie.

Now, nearly three decades later, 17 of these actors, costumers, location managers and VFX experts sat down with PEOPLE to share their memories of this pivotal scene and the impact of the movie’s legacy in the wake of Shyer’s December 2024 death. 

Lohan, 39, tells PEOPLE that she can’t pick just one piece of direction from Shyer or Meyers that has stuck with her because “everything” she learned “from both of them on that film has always been incredible.”

The director-producer pair had their work cut out for them during the pool scene. Over the couple of days that The Parent Trap crew took over the Marina del Rey Ritz-Carlton, the director of photography, Dean Cundey, said lighting was their biggest foe. 

Location manager Rory Enke remembers Cundey using a simple trick to help Lohan stop squinting into the bright sun. “Before they rolled cameras, he said, ‘Now Lindsay, I want you to close your eyes and put your face towards the sun.’ And with her eyes closed, she stood there for maybe a minute,” Enke explains to PEOPLE. “Then he said, ‘Now turn and look at me.’ With her back to the sun, she opened her eyes, and she didn’t squint.”

As the crew dealt with the ever-changing light, Quaid was getting his stunt practice in, changing between six identical Armani suits, being sprayed with pool water and intermittently jumping into the jacuzzi to warm up. 

Costume designer Penny Rose, who was hired in part because she had an 11-year-old daughter at the time, tells PEOPLE that the worst problem they faced still makes her laugh. “It was the shrinkage because of the chlorine. I mean, I’ve had Tom Cruise in a fake suede shirt so that he can get it wet. But you can’t really replicate an Armani suit,” she says, noting that the production team even got a sample of the Ritz’s pool water to run tests on the fabric. 

Each night, costume supervisor Carolyn Dessert tells PEOPLE, the suits were picked up by Dmitry Tokar at La Cienega Dry Cleaners, made perfect again and brought back at 5 a.m. the next morning to do it all again. 

Composer Alan Silvestri, who had already worked with Meyers and Shyer on Father of the Bride, says that this pool stunt was more than just a fun gag; it also called back to the couple’s body of work. 

“Filmmakers have their motifs. As you recall, George Banks [in Father of the Bride] fell in a pool and so Chuck and Nancy have a thing about falling into pools,” he says. “I think audiences fall in love with filmmakers and their approaches to things. So inherently there are Easter eggs that are sometimes incredibly subtle that make for enjoying a filmmaker’s body of work.”

Although the costuming was a hassle and the fall into the pool had to happen over and over again, Dessert says Quaid was a “trooper” and stayed “easy going.” 

Lohan, then 11, agreed in behind-the-scenes footage shot at the time. “He makes everything fun, even if it’s the worst day of his life. For other actors, he’ll make it fun,” she said of Quaid. “He’s always happy. I mean, he just did like five scenes in a row jumping into water, and he’s still happy.”

Finding the perfect Nick was not a simple feat, casting director Ilene Starger tells PEOPLE. Ultimately, through the search, Starger found that one throughline in the process made the biggest impact on how they picked “the ‘dream’ dad.”  

“One thing that moved me was that whenever Charles and Nancy’s daughters Annie and Hallie would visit their offices, Charles would just light up at the sight of them, and put everything aside to spend time with them,” she says. “It was obvious that he and Nancy were wonderful parents, and I think that informs their script for The Parent Trap, the roles of Nick and Elizabeth, and their working relationship with Lindsay.”

The role was unlike anything Quaid had starred in, as he was most known for violent, dramatic movies at the time, so his charming take on Nick Parker made an outsized impact on his career. The actor told PEOPLE in March 2025 that he is most recognized for the doting dad role.

“Everybody grew up with The Parent Trap and now there’s always new kids coming along,” he said, adding with a laugh, “I tell people, ‘I was your babysitter because your parents would put this on. They’d go do what they wanted to do in the next room.’ ”

While Quaid had quite a few acrobatics to perform in the scene, most of the actors were tasked with doing their best lounging by the poolside. When the scene opens, Nick’s housekeeper Chessy (Lisa Ann Walter), Elizabeth’s butler Martin (Simon Kunz) and Annie, still pretending to be Hallie (Lohan), are relaxing by the pool, discovering their newfound dynamic. 

“Most of the time we just glammed it out,” Kunz tells PEOPLE. The iconic house manager-butler duo had just met a scene ago, when Martin strolls into the hotel living room in only a Speedo. In the film, Chessy is taken by his confidence and the two immediately hit it off, rushing down to the pool, leaving Elizabeth to spiral.

On set, Kunz was not so sure about being the only nearly naked man in a Disney movie. Rose remembers having to “persuade” him into wearing the “budgie smuggler,” as she and Kunz called it, after Meyers insisted it would be funny. 

“If ever I do get recognized nowadays, Speedos comes up. Handshake and Speedos. That’s basically it. That’s the two things,” Kunz jokes to PEOPLE.

Walter, for her part, was reminded that he was “embarrassed” but tells PEOPLE, “he did not need to be.” 

“There was nothing to be ashamed of, seriously. When he came out, me and Natasha looked at each other and gave each other the raised eyebrow of, ‘Hey,’ “ she recalls.

Walter even remembers Shyer at one point offering to “strip down to a Speedo” with him so that the actor didn’t “have to worry.”

In part, Chessy and Martin look to have such an instantly natural dynamic because Walter and Kunz had connected quickly on set, and their chemistry was evident. He says she took him under her wing because it was his first time in Los Angeles, and he had originally arrived solo. 

“I did take him under my wing because I had a house in L.A. and family, and he was alone. Of course, he was gonna come over,” Walter says. “My family loved him, too.” While shooting the pool scene, and sunning themselves as Kunz remembers, he and Walter also had a little photoshoot, resulting in what she says are her “favorite on-set pictures ever.”

After Quaid falls into the pool, Martin snaps a photo of him, a moment Kunz said was a bit of improv. The actor says this kind of creativity was encouraged on set — Quaid’s “you’re all wet” line was also improvised — and guided by Meyers’ particular filmmaking sensibility. 

While some of the actors took a breather and had fun improvising during these shoot days, for the crew, the pool scene proved to be one of the most difficult logistically. Meyers and Shyer’s assistant at the time, Roshanna Baron, who also appeared as an extra in the pool scene, remembers the mayhem of the shoot. 

“That day was very much a whirlwind. It had a lot of moving parts because everybody was on set and there were a lot of intricacies in trying to get the timing right,” she tells PEOPLE.

Script supervisor Jeanne Byrd, who was tasked with ensuring continuity at all times with the added challenge of motion control technology, tells PEOPLE that the scene had many hurdles. 

“Oh my gosh. Who said what, when, at what point does he come up out of the water with what hand flailing so she [Meyers] could cut to the wider shot of the same hand flailing? I mean, it was a nightmare,” she says with a laugh. “I don’t think I slept for days before we shot that scene and probably drank lots of wine on the night that we finished it.”

Twenty-seven years later, though, they both have fresh perspectives on the moment. Baron still remembers the air on set. “When we got done with the scene, everybody was clapping and grateful,” she says. “It was a fun set. Everybody was just happy to work around each other. It was a joy to be around when everybody knows what they’re doing and gets it done right.”

Meyers agrees and adds, “The whole cast on that film was fantastic, and it was very fun having them all in the same scene.” Thomas Harrigan, who was an assistant location manager, also concurs that all the right people came together on The Parent Trap, working to the best of their ability to make a difficult project come to life. “You just make it happen,” he tells PEOPLE. “There’s almost nothing impossible to do in film.”

And, despite the difficulties, Byrd concedes that she still enjoyed the pool scene more than the motion control shots. 

Out of only a handful of scenes like it, the pool scene featured an actor other than Lohan taking part in the new technology, Elaine Hendrix. Meyers and Shyer said they loved writing the scene in which her character, Meredith, enters and finally learns that there is not one but two of her archnemeses to contend with. 

In real life, the then-26-year-old was also taking on this new motion control style of shooting in stride. The technology allows camera movement to be computerized and replicated so filmmakers can shoot two sides of the same shot in an identical fashion. For the actors, this means repeating their lines and reactions over and over again.

“I remember Nancy saying that she trusted me. By that point, she could see everything I could do physically and that she wasn’t concerned,” Hendrix tells PEOPLE. “And I remember feeling kind of honored by that.”

Joining the ranks of Polly Holliday (who played camp leader Marva Sr. and appeared in a motion control shot during the breakfast line), Hendrix was directed to do the scene by the pool over and over again “exactly like you did it before.” Hendrix says. “That took particular focus and attention and time, and that was just longer to do.”

Gayle Busby, one of the visual effects producers, remembers the massive operation it took to run the motion control tech. Seven on-site technicians were constantly compositing the side-by-side shots of Lohan in the moment so that Meyers could pick which she most liked.

Byrd likens the process to “flying the plane while building it.” She tells PEOPLE, “The motion control was stimulating because it was new and different, but it was also scary and so scientific.”

The writing in this technically brilliant scene has its own charming flair, too, which made it Richardson’s favorite in the whole movie, according to Meyers. 

The writers maintained a line from the original movie, when Annie says she has been “quite without a father,” and had a little more fun with Hallie’s side of the coin, having the fiery twin rant about her upcoming “messed up teenage years.”

This labor of love on the intensive pool scene paid off, and then some. Ed Curry, director of sales and marketing at the Marina del Rey Ritz-Carlton, tells PEOPLE the hotel is lucky to still have some of the same staff who were working during filming and many of these folks (and guests!) remember the movie fondly.

“Of all the filming we have had at the hotel over the past 35 years, that is the movie that guests mention the most,” he says. “People love the movie, and all seem to know that is our pool area.”

Curry continues, “The leadership team even watched the pool scene for inspiration as we look to renovate the pool area.”

Picking locations for The Parent Trap, including the Marina Ritz, was an at times painstaking process, led by Enke, John Panzarella and Thomas Harrigan, among others. Enke, who had worked with Quaid on The Right Stuff years earlier, remembers dressing up an administration building on Treasure Island to look like the front of the grand hotel.

Panzarella recalls spending time with revered production designer Dean Tavoularis while he and his family and friends, whom he’d brought on as crew, searched for locations and had laughter-filled lunches in between. 

“The decorator [Gary Fettis] was his nephew, the art director [Alex Tavoularis] was his brother and the prop master [Douglas T. Madison] was somebody he had worked with for years and years, and we’d all go out to lunch together. It was like the Tavoularis Mafia,” he tells PEOPLE with a laugh. “Dean would regale the table with incredible stories of Apocalypse Now and the making of The Godfather. It was just magic for me.”

Casting director Starger reflects on how the magic of making The Parent Trap reverberated out into the success of the movie.

“It’s worth remembering that this was Nancy Meyers’ first film as a director, and she did a superb job. It’s a film which seems to appeal to all genders and ages, and it has stood the test of time in that audiences still enjoy it,” she tells PEOPLE. “I always smile when I’m on a plane and notice, on a screen by someone else’s seat, that they are watching this movie!”

The familial vibe on set spread into the cast’s real-life connections and into the legacy of the movie, too. “I’m very close with Nancy Meyers now, and I was close with Charles. They were like a second family to me,” Lohan says.

At the end of the director’s commentary, as the credits play, Shyer says something particularly poignant to hear today. 

“If we get lucky, this could be one that lasts,” he remarks as the final credits roll. And lasted it has, in ways far beyond the cast and crew’s imagination.