Ariel Winter’s ‘Mean Girls’ makeover

THE Modern Family star dresses up as iconic teen queens from Mean Girls, Clueless, Gossip Girl and more.

Ariel Winter’s ‘Mean Girls’ makeover

MODERN Family star Ariel Winter has tipped her hat to some of the most iconic teen queens of film and TV in a stunning new shoot for Cosmopolitan magazine.

The 18-year-old, who plays nerdy teen Alex Dunphy in the hit series, dresses up as the sort of girls who would most likely bully her character at school: the mean girls of Clueless, Gossip Girl, The Craft and, yep, Mean Girls.

In an interview to accompany the shoot, Winter said she loved being able to send up these well-known schoolyard bullies.

“They’re pretty unabashed about the things that they feel. But at the same time, I don’t really admire somebody who deliberately goes out of her way to hurt other people. Being mean to people is not cool,” she says.

“And why I found it so awesome to do this shoot and play these characters is that I’m right now trying to speak out against bullying and people tearing others down, and I love that I got to play these characters and trump them in a sense. I got to overtake them. What they do is not right — and I’m above it.”

Among the teen villains Ariel takes on is Mean Girls’ own Regina George, played by Rachel McAdams in the original 2004 film:

And Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf, originally played by Leighton Meester:

Winter also gets Goth to dress up as Nancy Downs, memorably played by Fairuza Balk in the 1996 cult classic The Craft, and dons perhaps her most extreme look to channel Amber, the red-headed ‘ensembelley challenged’ arch rival to Cher in the 1995 hit Clueless:

Winter’s truly got no time for bullies: she made headlines in February when she wore a dress exposing the scars from her recent breast reduction surgery on the SAG Awards red carpet.

“There is a reason I didn’t make an effort to cover up my scars! They are part of me and I’m not ashamed of them at all,” she said at the time.

Check out Ariel getting into character below: