One of my favourite bits of Lindsay Lohan lore stems from a magazine profile in 2011, when the Mean Girls star was in the midst of a professional crisis, haunting hotel suites in Hollywood and Miami and raging indignantly. On this given day, she was apparently furious about the Oscar-winning Natalie Portman film Black Swan, insisting to those in her immediate vicinity that – as someone trained in ballet since the age of nine – she really should have been considered for a role in it. But the film industry had turned on her and Black Swan was not to be, while Lohan’s flexes of power were confined to the small and ridiculous.
“As we pulled up to the Fontainebleau, a bright-orange parking cone was blocking the entrance,” wrote journalist Jacquelynn Powers in Plum Miami magazine. “Not accustomed to waiting, apparently, she lowered the car’s window and shouted, ‘Move that cone – I’m Lindsay Lohan!’ And it was done.”
Lohan didn’t typically sit for interviews back then. She had a habit of agreeing to chat with a magazine, pose for the accompanying photos, but then bounce before any tape recorders were pulled out. The finished articles would subsequently become TMZ-era variations on Gay Talese’s immortal Esquire feature “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” – gossipy, anecdotal writing about a slippery star who was never quite available for a real conversation, but whose flighty presence would always result in loud, fascinating chaos.
The Lohan of 2025 is a very different beast. As is the media industrial complex she’s re-entered while promoting her new film, the long-in-the-works sequel Freakier Friday. Gentle profile interviews of the star – of which there have been only a few – paint a portrait of a serenely family-oriented 39-year-old, someone fiercely protective of her privacy, her mental health, and her new life in Dubai. It’s there that the formerly erratic Lohan has apparently found peace, married to the financier Bader Shammas and mother to a two-year-old boy.
Amid the deliberate, reassuring dullness, however, are glimpses of the Lohan of old – there’s not been anything cone-related, nor fragrantly messy in that uniquely Lohan-y way, where intense tabloid attention and a severe case of own-worst-enemy disease proved as toxic as it did guiltily compelling. What I mean is Lohan’s relatively unique understanding of star image and the film industry, her shrewd entrepreneurialism (once so coloured by her taste for self-sabotage), and the rightful sense that she’s always been owed a better career.
“Yeah, I do [think I was pigeonholed],” Lohan told The Sunday Times last week, in a rare interview in this press cycle that wasn’t entirely devoted to nostalgia, the powers of manifestation, or the – checks notes – chia seeds and ice water behind her newly taut, glowing face. She’d been reminded of A Prairie Home Companion, a downbeat and folksy musical drama she made in 2006 with the director Robert Altman, where she played daughter to Meryl Streep. “I was so thrilled to work on [that], and yet even today I have to fight for stuff that is like that, which is frustrating. Because, well, you know me as this – but you also know I can do that. So let me! Give me the chance.”
She has been ringing the same bell for much of her career. It’s now harder to remember a time when Lohan wasn’t clawing her way back to legitimate work, or fighting for professional respect, or mounting a comeback. “I wanted to do this movie so people can see that I’m a f***ing actress and I’ve been doing it forever and it’s about time people see that,” she told Nylon magazine in 2007, while promoting her ill-fated thriller I Know Who Killed Me (“It has stripping, stigmata and amputee sex,” went The New York Times). “I want to get a nomination,” she continued. “I want to win an Oscar.” Three years later, she told Vanity Fair, “I want my career back – I want the respect that I had when I was doing great movies.” And four years after that, in an episode of her deeply bleak Oprah-produced reality show Lindsay, Lohan seemed to have spiralled completely. “Every day I’m not on a film set, I’m wasting my talent because that’s what I was born – and live – to do,” she insisted. She then claimed her agent didn’t fight hard enough for her to get a role in Marvel’s The Avengers.
The dominant reaction around these quotes at the time – with Lohan floating in and out of prisons and rehabilitation clinics, her court-ordered ankle monitor reportedly flashing and beeping at an MTV Movie Awards party hosted by Katy Perry – was that she was delusional. This was the girl who made Disney movies. Now she (very publicly) wanted an Oscar?
But Lohan’s earlier press repeatedly drove home her magic, and the clear reasons why she felt entitled to more than she was getting, and why she was so resentful of how her career had turned out. She had a screen presence that couldn’t be taught, a confidence that was impressive rather than irritating, and a preternatural acting range. To this day, it’s quite staggering how – at the age of 12 – she so seamlessly played two very different identical twins in her film debut, 1998’s The Parent Trap. And that she had the cajónes to walk up to the head of Disney, who had produced the film, and insist she ought to be paid two salaries for playing dual roles. And that she waltzed into the audition for Freaky Friday, completely ignoring how the character was described on the page (a moody teenage goth) and playing it her way (preppy, ambitious). Lohan’s part was rewritten as grunge-influenced once she was hired.
Meryl Streep called her “terrific”. Jane Fonda called her “brilliant” and “talented”, while conceding that she had to tell her off for being late to the set of their 2007 film Georgia Rule. Nina Jacobson, the Disney chief who helped shepherd Lohan’s early career, spoke repeatedly of how frustrating it was to see the star get distracted from her work. “The image issue aside, professionalism-wise we were disappointed,” she told The New York Times in 2007, after Lohan skipped out on a European press tour for the Disney film Herbie: Fully Loaded. “And I was sad, because she’s so charismatic and appealing on screen. It’s a very sad thing to see it go to waste this way.”
And then there’d be Lohan, who’d spend her interviews around this time talking about other actors and the parts that she wasn’t playing: she should have been able to audition for Natalie Portman’s role in Closer, she insisted; why doesn’t she get the respect of Scarlett Johansson or Keira Knightley, she pondered. “I work just as hard as those people and sometimes [the media] make it seem that they’re more mature because their fan base is more mature and my fan base is younger,” she said in 2005.
For all the sort-of comebacks Lohan has made over the last decade (remember when she was in the Sky One comedy Sick Note?), it does feel as if this current one might actually take. Not because Freakier Friday is meant to be very good – in her review, The Independent’s critic Clarisse Loughrey was adamant Lohan deserves better material – but because it’s a safe and likely invaluable business decision, carried by nostalgia (Lohan’s cameo in last year’s film adaptation of the Mean Girls musical was a wise move, too) and smartly gets her back in Disney’s good graces. Next up? A limited series – and a drama, at that – about a compulsive liar. “This is the first time where I don’t have to have a romantic interest, where I don’t have to kiss someone at the end of the movie,” Lohan said in May. “Which is so refreshing – to not have to be that girl for once.”
She’s admitted that she has a clear, entrepreneurial vision for her future. And that her roles from now on won’t revisit some of the backfiring extremes of her younger years, where she followed up A Prairie Home Companion not with more serious dramas, but with I Know Who Killed Me and Paul Schrader’s unintentionally hilarious erotic thriller The Canyons. “I’m never looking to do something that presses too many boundaries – I tried that when I was younger, I didn’t love it,” she said last week. “I don’t want to do something that will cut my whole fanbase off.” Finally, a moment of perceptive revelation from a newly quiet star.
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