From County Down to Cape Town: How Sophie Lennon Became a Cheetah Girl
For anyone who came of age in the early 2000s, the phrase “Cheetahlicious” needs no explanation. The Cheetah Girls franchise — which began with the 2003 Disney Channel film about four New York teenagers forming a girl group, and spawned sequels in 2006 and 2008 — was a cultural juggernaut that shaped a generation’s understanding of friendship, ambition, and pop stardom. Now, more than two decades later, Disney is reviving the property with The Cheetah Girls: Next Gen, and the story of how one Northern Irish teenager landed a lead role offers a fascinating window into the mechanics of modern global casting.
300,000 Auditions, Four Roles
Sophie Lennon, a 16-year-old from Mayobridge, County Down, secured one of four coveted spots in the new film after a global casting search that drew approximately 300,000 teenage auditionees. Her self-tape required her to demonstrate singing, dancing, and acting — the triple-threat standard for any musical franchise role. Lennon received a callback roughly a week after submitting her tape.
“I genuinely thought I had no chance,” she said, acknowledging that a Northern Irish performer landing a role so historically tied to American characters seemed improbable. The franchise initially considered incorporating a Northern Irish accent for her character, Brooklyn, but the role was ultimately written as Irish-American.
A CV That Defies Her Age
What makes Lennon’s selection less surprising, in retrospect, is her already substantial performance résumé. She has appeared on both Britain’s Got Talent and America’s Got Talent, performed on the West End, and represented Ireland at the 2022 Junior Eurovision Song Contest. For context, Junior Eurovision participation alone places a performer in an elite international tier of young vocalists — Ireland’s entrants are selected through national processes and compete against peers from dozens of countries. That Lennon was also working with a dialect coach to master an Irish-American accent for the role, which she described as “easy to pick up” thanks to years of mimicking American television, underscores how preparatory her earlier experiences were for this moment.
Lennon says she connected immediately with Brooklyn, describing the character as “determined” and “all about supporting her girls” — traits she sees in herself. Brooklyn is written as an ambitious teenager from a musical family who dreams of making it big.
The NDA, the GCSEs, and the Phone Call
The timeline of Lennon’s casting is worth noting for its emotional whiplash. The life-changing phone call arrived just days before her GCSE exams were scheduled to begin. Lennon says she cried so intensely she lost her voice for a week. A non-disclosure agreement then prevented her from sharing the news with even her closest friends while she prepared for what she described as flying to Los Angeles for a screen test in a Disney movie.
“I go to school, I hang out with my friends and my life has just completely changed overnight,” she said — a sentiment that captures the surreal disjunction between ordinary teenage life and the machinery of a major studio production.
Four Months in Cape Town
Lennon is now in Cape Town, South Africa, where she will spend four months preparing for filming. Her daily schedule runs from 7:00 a.m. through a 12-hour block packed with choreography rehearsals, studio recordings, script work, costume fittings, and guitar lessons. The production has already conducted a table read, multiple cast dinners, and hair and makeup trials — the latter of which Lennon called her favourite part of the process so far.
She stars alongside Leah Sava Jeffries, Carmen Sanchez, and Kaileen Chang as the four leads. The new film’s premise shifts the setting from New York to Africa, where the teenagers travel to volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary and, in the franchise’s established formula, find their voices and take to the stage.
Four Record Deal Offers — and Counting
Beyond the film itself, Lennon’s casting has already generated significant music industry interest. She has received four record deal offers from major labels. Those conversations are reportedly on hold while filming continues, but the fact that a 16-year-old from rural Northern Ireland is fielding multiple label offers before her debut film has even wrapped production speaks to the enduring commercial power of the Disney platform. The original Cheetah Girls franchise launched soundtrack albums that charted internationally and sold millions of copies; the infrastructure around Next Gen appears poised to function similarly.
Lennon frames her experience in terms that read as both genuinely felt and remarkably poised for someone her age: “Now I’ve realised everything is possible. If you want something badly enough, if you work hard enough, and if you never give up, you really can get there.”
Why This Revival Matters
The Cheetah Girls occupies a specific place in Disney’s franchise history — it predates High School Musical and Hannah Montana, and its emphasis on a multiethnic girl group navigating friendship and ambition was quietly groundbreaking for a children’s network in 2003. Reviving it now, with a new international cast and a plot centred on wildlife conservation, signals Disney’s intent to update the franchise’s themes for a generation that has grown up with climate anxiety and global connectivity as defaults rather than novelties.
For Lennon, the stakes are both personal and professional. She has GCSEs to complete, a dialect to maintain, a film to shoot, and a music career to consider — all before she has likely finished secondary school. Whether The Cheetah Girls: Next Gen recaptures the cultural footprint of its predecessors remains to be seen, but the story of its casting process — 300,000 auditions narrowing to four teenagers, one of them a Junior Eurovision veteran from County Down — is already a compelling narrative in its own right.