For 94 minutes, Hayden Panettiere and Michelle Trachtenberg are still teenagers whose dreams are ahead of them, adulthood hasn’t complicated their lives, and the tragedies that would eventually befall them are nowhere in sight.
That’s what screenwriter Hadley Davis sees when she looks back on the Disney film “Ice Princess.”
“When you watch ‘Ice Princess’ for that hour and a half, Hayden Panettiere and Michelle Trachtenberg are kind of forever Gen and Casey,” Davis tells USA TODAY. “They're forever high schoolers with their dreams and their lives stretched out before them.”
Released in 2005, “Ice Princess” wasn’t a box office hit, but the coming-of-age movie left its mark on a generation of millennial girls. Now, after Panettiere and Trachtenberg
died more than a year apart, fans are returning to the movie, and Davis is seeing the story she wrote about two teenage girls chasing their futures through an entirely different lens.
“It's really hard to digest the dichotomy between the tragedy of their lives and the feel-good nature of a G-rated Disney movie for young girls,” Davis says. “I think this is part of the reason why it strikes a chord. It does make us all ache for a simpler, kinder moment in time.”
Why 'Ice Princess' is beloved by a generation of fans
In “Ice Princess,” Panettiere plays Gen Harwood, a gifted figure skater whose mother, also her coach, pushes her to compete. Trachtenberg’s Casey Carlyle is a Harvard-bound physics whiz who discovers an unexpected passion for figure skating. Both teenagers find themselves caught between the futures their mothers envision for them and the lives they want for themselves.
Davis came to the project after getting her start writing for “Dawson’s Creek” and “Spin City.” During a meeting with Disney, she was asked to rework “Skate,” a script originally written by “The Princess Diaries” author Meg Cabot about a young woman hockey player. Davis transformed the premise into the story that became “Ice Princess,” and says she came up with the title too. Disney greenlit the movie after her first draft and quickly sent it into production.
“This was unheard of then and it's still unheard of now,” she explains. “The movie had some pixie dust on it from the beginning,”
As Davis reshaped the story, she drew from her own adolescence. A serious dancer growing up in Massachusetts, she studied under a former American Ballet Theatre dancer who had daughters about her age. At home, Davis had what she calls an “anti-stage mom” who supported her dancing but encouraged her to go to college.
Those experiences helped Davis frame the themes at the heart of “Ice Princess,” including the girls’ pressure to excel, the expectations parents place on their children, and the desire to choose a future for yourself. Looking back, Davis also sees an aching parallel between those themes and the young actresses who ultimately played Gen and Casey.
“The essence of the story in ‘Ice Princess’ is having dreams for yourself that are different from those of your parents. That's universal and timeless. It's part of the story of growing up,” Davis says. “It's not lost on me that [Panettiere’s] character in the movie has a dream to be a normal kid and go to the prom. That's her arc, and it's not the arc that she got to live.”
How Hayden Panettiere and Michelle Trachtenberg brought 'Ice Princess' to life
For Davis, visiting the film’s Toronto set meant stepping inside a world that had previously existed only in her imagination. It was Panettiere and Trachtenberg who ultimately gave Gen and Casey their personalities, transforming the characters Davis had written on the page into the teenagers a generation of viewers would come to love.
“Hayden and Michelle were total pros,” Davis says. “They were funny, heartwarming, and kind of everything I had pictured and more.”
Panettiere was only about 14 when “Ice Princess” was filmed, but Davis remembers her star power already being undeniable and that she brought a maturity to the role — and an unexpected ability on the ice.
“She was not only a natural actress but to everyone's amazement, she was also a natural ice skater and everyone was amazed by her,” Davis says. “She had a certain maturity about her. She was actually playing a character slightly older than she was, but that wouldn't occur to you watching the movie. She was just a star, it was obvious.”
What 'Ice Princess' means now
Long before its recent resurgence, Davis has been privy to the film’s cult following. Before “Ice Princess” was available to stream on Disney+, viewers sent her letters in the mail, and she grew accustomed to the “outsized reactions” from millennial women who learned she had written the movie. In 2017 Davis even connected with Zahra Lari, the first competitive hijabi figure skater, after Lari mentioned loving “Ice Princess” in an interview with The New York Times. (The duo even went on to write a children’s book together, “Not Yet: The Story of an Unstoppable Skater.”)
“It’s a reminder of the reach and impact of the stories we tell in Hollywood, and these are the stories that Hayden Panettiere and Michelle Trachtenberg helped to tell.”
But seeing “Ice Princess” resurface in the days since Panettiere’s death has made Davis think differently about the movie and the two young actresses preserved within it.
“What's incredible about art is that it's immortal. It lives on, and the beauty and the talent of Michelle and Hayden are preserved in this movie and in their entire body of work,” Davis says. “It's a G-rated movie and from that moment in their lives. The complications of fame and adulthood hadn’t factored in yet. There's just this purity to that.”
Even the movie’s soundtrack has taken on new resonance. Fans have been sharing Aly & AJ’s “No One,” which plays over the opening titles, but Davis finds herself thinking about another song in the film: Diana DeGarmo’s “Reachin' for Heaven,” which plays during the climactic sequence as Casey competes at Sectionals. After falling on the ice, she gets back up and finishes her program.
“It's an uplifting song about resilience, but now it takes on this uncanny and deeply tragic meaning,” she says.
More than two decades after she wrote “Ice Princess,” Davis could never have anticipated what the movie would eventually come to represent. For the generation that grew up watching it, the film remains a piece of childhood. For Davis, it has also become a lasting record of Panettiere and Trachtenberg when they were young, talented, and still standing at the beginning of everything.
“You write a screenplay and you have no idea what's going to happen to it, you don’t even know if it's going to get made. So to have it be such a big part of people's memories and childhood's is really special,” she says. “I hope that Hayden's daughter, if she hasn't already seen it, watches it. It shows her mother in the most beautiful light.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hayden Panettiere, Michelle Trachtenberg and their 'Ice Princess' legacy
