Lisa Ann Walter (left) and Elaine Hendrix.Photo:Courtesy of Ancestry
Courtesy of Ancestry
There’s an ease that comes with 25 years of friendship and, despite some new physical distance, a comfort, for two of Hollywood’s favorites.
“People always talk about, ‘Oh, you make time for your friends and you have to make it important.’ It was never a chore. It was never something that I had to schedule,” Lisa Ann Walter tells PEOPLE ofher relationshipwith fellow actress Elaine Hendrix, a duo most-often recognized as their respective onscreen counterparts fromThe Parent Trap: Chessy and Meredith. (In compliance with the SAG-AFTRA strike, Walter and Hendrix did not discuss any of their current or former projects.)
Since meeting while filming thebeloved 1998 movie, the pair has navigated career highs and lows, the additions of new family members (both human and animal) and busy schedules to prioritize each other. And now, they’ve discovered their friendship may have sprung from more than just luck — it might have been fated.
Walter, 60, is the star of the premiere episode ofAncestry’snewYouTube series,unFamiliar, in which she revisits the streets and buildings her relatives inhabited on Manhattan’s Lower East Side alongside her sons, Jordan, Spencer and Simon. She embarked on the journey to learn more about her roots beyond the “family lore,” she says.
Lisa Ann Walter and Elaine Hendrix.Courtesy of Ancestry
“I think that the interest for me was around who they were, what their life was,” Walter explains. “I’m a big history fan. So I wanted to know how it was that they lived day-to-day, what jobs did they have, and that sort of stuff. And I learned a lot about that. And there was stuff that I learned about my other great-grandmother that I never knew.”
She also discovered something else new in the course of filming the episode: Her forever friend had roots on the same street. Hendrix’s great-grandparents lived just blocks away from Walter’s great-grandparents on N.Y.C.’s Elizabeth Street during the early 1900s. Hendrix, 52, surprises Walter with the revelation during theunFamiliarinstallment.
“Of course they knew each other,” Hendrix speculates in the episode. She adds, “It was fate.”
“I knew that my mom’s side of the family was Italian and had came in through New York, and several of my family members were later born in New York and grew up there. And at that time, it was a very small community, a very tight-knit community. The Italians all lived in one area,” Hendrix tells PEOPLE. “So when Ancestry came back to me and said, ‘You’re never going to believe this’ . . . I was like, ‘Of course they did.’ And we’re speculating, but the chances are extraordinarily high that they knew each other.”
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During their trip to the past, which Walter admitted was an emotional experience for her, theAbbott Elementarystar and Hendrix got up to just a little bit of no good — sneaking into one of the buildings tied to their ancestry exploration. That, Walter says, is just Hendrix’s way: “Elaine is very bold . . . she’ll just do stuff.”
But Walter loves that abouther friend. While Hendrix cherishes Walter’s “warmth.”
“Meeting Lisa is like walking into a great big hug, and she’s that way. Although I will say — and this is also one of the things I love about her — is that she’s that way, unless you’ve crossed or done some s— to her or one of her friends, and then watch out because then mama bear comes out and back off,” theDynastyalum tells PEOPLE.
source: people.com
