Life-Size 2: Tyra Banks and Francia Raisa on the sequel’s nostalgic Christmas magic

Tyra Banks and Francia Raisa promise Life-Size 2 will bring out your inner kid with a dash of Christmas magic! See what they teased about Eve 2.0 and how they’ve paid homage to the original movie.

In Life-Size 2, Grace Manning is the 20-something-year-old CEO of Marathon Toys, the company started by her mother that manufactures the famous Eve doll. Grace never asked for the responsibilities of being CEO, and she knows that she’s in way over her head.

At the start of the movie, Grace is going through a quarter-life crisis, and when the board at Marathon Toys wants to discontinue the Eve doll, Grace finds herself confronting a friend from the past when her own Eve doll magically comes to life. Grace is reluctant to trust the mystery woman at first, but Eve works to help Grace find her confidence as a young adult, shaping Grace into the strong leader Eve knows she can be.

Life-Size fans have patiently waited 18 years for the sequel, and we’re so excited that Life-Size 2 is part of Freeform’s 25 Days of Christmas. But no one is more excited than Tyra Banks herself, who has been working to bring this project to life (literally) as an executive producer for the past several years.

“To be a producer this time… to have been through this process for five years now, six years trying to bring this to life, for it to finally be real is pretty cool,” Banks said. “But also having to wear so many hats was very challenging.”

While she is reprising her role in Life-Size 2 as Eve, Banks is portraying a completely different Eve doll this time around. “It’s been super fun for me to add so much more comedy to it,” she said. “I think they’re two different performances. This is like so 2.0.”

How Life-Size 2 is bringing all of the nostalgic Christmas magic

Francia Raisa, who plays Grace Manning in the movie, has a unique connection to her character. Raisa remembers when Life-Size first aired, and much like Grace, she too is now reconnecting with the Eve doll story 18 years later. Eve “grows up with us, and I really appreciated the movie came back with us because it speaks to today,” Raisa said.

In the movie, Grace is struggling in her role as Marathon Toys’ CEO and doesn’t initially have the leadership skills or financial knowledge to be successful. “I think it’s nice that they touch upon the growing pains that we go through at 25 years old and that kind of anger we go through when life hits us and we’re not ready for it, or we didn’t want it,” she shared. “In particular, my character, where the one thing that I thought took my mother away from me is the one thing that I now have to take care of. She’s like ‘Are you kidding me right now?’”

Raisa also explained why Life-Size 2 is fitting for the holiday season, a time when we’re reconnecting with family and take time to embrace traditions and nostalgic Christmas magic. “Nostalgia is everything. It just does something right now in this world and just feeling so disconnected. It’s the things from our past that make us look up from our devices.”

Even if you didn’t grow up with Life-Size, the sequel promises to give you all the feel-good memories from your (smartphone free) childhood holidays.

For Banks, Life-Size 2 is also about unifying audiences and finding a common love for those same childhood memories. “Some of the scenes that we added in kind of remind you what you felt when you were a kid, and it brings that inner kid out,” she said. “It kind of just gives you that whole warm feeling of ‘Oh, she’s still in there. She’s still in there. Everything’s not all bad’.”

Banks is confident Life-Size 2 has something special to offer audiences this holiday season. “In the present moment, with there just being so much tension in our country, this is something that is so uniting,” she explained. “This takes us back to a place 15 years ago when we weren’t living in a time like this… You may be on the red side or the blue side, but when you come and watch Life-Size, it’s purple.”

“It’s definitely a nice escape for sure. We all turn to movies and tv for us to kind of escape life a little bit, so this is really nice,” Raisa added.

How Life-Size 2 will pay homage to the original movie

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For all the Life-Size superfans out there, we’ve confirmed that there are a few “Easter eggs” from the original movie you should expect to see. Even though Lindsay Lohan isn’t returning, Life-Size 2 does connect the story to her character with a tribute and shout-out.

“There are a couple different moments,” Banks assured us. “I wanted the audience to see Lindsay before they saw me in the movie. So, there’s a very strategic placement at the beginning of the movie and something later to play homage to that.”

Though Raisa is a fan of the first movie, she said that coming into this project, she never thought of her character as being Lindsay Lohan’s character, Casey. “I never compared myself to Lindsay,” she said. “It’s a movie that I was a personal fan of, like everyone else is. When you’re the lead in anything, and you’re kind of helping carry the film, it’s pretty nerve-wracking… but I never compared myself. I think life really prepared me for it. I like that I’m older than Grace because I can look back and not wonder, ‘Oh, what is this like?’ I’ve been through that.”

Life-Size 2 centers on our connection as adults with toys and friendships from our childhood, something that Banks says she relates to personally. “I still have toys from my childhood,” she said. “I have this doll. Her name is Christina. She was a black, beautiful doll, and she was a cheerleader, and I still have it. I gave it to my son to play with, and he calls her mommy.”

Raisa didn’t say whether she kept a specific toy from her own childhood though. “I just have [Tyra’s] phone number,” she joked.

Watch Tyra Banks return as Eve in Life-Size 2

Life-Size 2 premieres Sunday, December 2 at 9/8c on Freeform.