Having survived the paparazzi era, Lindsay Lohan is now thriving. Photo / Getty Images
Lohan’s big-screen return with Freakier Friday is a testament to her resilience - and perhaps a redemption story for us, too.
There she was, all over my timeline back in September, looking poised and confident, with poreless skin, wrapped in a tasteful ensemble of heather-grey silk, wool and fur.
“Lindsay Lohan really went back in time and grabbed her old face,” read one of the tweets.
And at 38 (now 39), she was triggering joyous nostalgia, not just because she seemed to age backward, as celebrities are wont to do these days, but because she radiated an inner peace that those of us who have loved her for decades always dreamed she would someday have.
Our Lindsay – the Disney star turned millennial victim of fame, the redheaded ingenue with limitless talent who had been plagued by substance addiction and her parents’ terrible choices – had not just made it through relentless bullying and exploitation from the Paparazzi Industrial Complex™ but was now thriving. In this new era, she could be celebrated for her rightful return to the screen in middling but enjoyable holiday rom-coms for Netflix, made poignant because of everything we knew she had gone through just to be standing there amid that tinsel and fake snow.
The “Underskirt Era” – as author Sarah Ditum called it in her 2024 book Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s – in which paparazzi would actually lie on sidewalks as young starlets exited clubs, hoping to snap shots of their exposed nether regions, had not been kind to her. Who among us looked away when the New York Post splashed a photograph of her, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in a car leaving a party at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with the headline, “Bimbo summit”? The tsk-tsking over her lifestyle choices; the DUI; the many, many car crashes; the stints in rehab and how far her career had fallen from her Mean Girls heyday: they were all voyeurism and judgment disguised as concern.
Freakier Friday isn’t just a follow-up to a beloved aughts kids’ classic that shot Lohan to stardom 22 years ago but a testament to her resilience. It’s her first movie to hit theatres since playing a cameo as herself in 2013’s Scary Movie V. (Her vaguely pornographic erotic thriller The Canyons, written by Bret Easton Ellis, was meant to be her volley into serious adult cinema, but wound up a straight-to-video flop that same year.) It’s also a movie she’s made having become sober and having found peace in Dubai, where she’s lived for more than 10 years, building a life with financier husband Bader Shammas – from a prominent Kuwaiti family – and their 2-year-old son, Luai, whose face she’s never shown on social media.
It will perhaps be an unearned redemption story for us, too, the consumers of mess, who might do well switching bodies with one of the famous party girls we terrorised, to understand their perspectives – a do-over in a kinder, gentler celebrity economy, in which stars have wrested control of the most valuable currency they have: their images and who has access to them.
Our excitement for Lohan’s comeback has “a huge amount” to do with our own guilt and shame around the fate that our gossip-hungry culture wrought her, says Sophie Gilbert, British columnist for the Atlantic and author of the new book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, about the influence of porn on the fall of feminism, and how cruel the aughts were to young women.
“As consumers of [today’s] media, we have much more empathy now for stars who are struggling, and much more insight into how challenging fame can be. We’re much more thoughtful with regard to mental health,” Gilbert writes me in an email. “So many young stars of that generation haven’t been able to come back from the particular cruelty of the 2000s, and so the idea that Lindsay might be one who’s able to is gratifying.”
To watch Lohan in the original Freaky Friday, filmed when she was 16, is to see a young actress coming into her powers. As petulant high-schooler Anna, who switches place with her uptight mom who’s getting married in two days, she’s funny and fierce. That’s really Lohan playing guitar for Anna’s blazing solo with her band, Pink Slip, and singing the closing pop-punk song, Ultimate. And that’s really Lohan playing an even harder guitar solo, with rock star bravado and two decades of wisdom, in the sequel.
“When I was younger, I was fearless,” she told the Sunday Times recently. It’s so plain in her early films how much she loved acting and how incredibly natural she was on-screen that it becomes almost painful to rewatch those, knowing how difficult her path would become. But in many ways, that’s what makes it such a joy to see her thriving in Freakier Friday, playing the mum to 15-year-old Harper (Julia Butters), and a bride-to-be to a smoking-hot single-dad chef, Eric (Manny Jacinto). Jamie Lee Curtis has said that the idea for a sequel really started to gel when Lohan brought her son over to meet his movie grandma. The entire plot seems to be oriented so Lohan and Curtis can spend the maximum screen time side by side, goofing off as teens in adult bodies. (Lohan and Curtis declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Next up, she has big ambitions to get into more serious fare, such as starring in and executive producing the upcoming Hulu series Count My Lies, a psychological thriller about a conniving nanny who fibs her way into a job with a couple who are brimming with explosive secrets.
The official start of the “Lohanaissance” is probably late 2022, when she surprised the world after a nine-year acting hiatus by starring in a Netflix Christmas rom-com, Falling for Christmas, which she followed up with 2024’s Irish Wish and Our Little Secret. But writer Alissa Bennett, who did a deep dive on Lohan for The C-Word – a podcast she hosts with Lena Dunham, which reframes the lives of women who’ve been deemed “crazy” by the public – believes Lohan’s relaunch began earlier that year, with a winking 2022 Super Bowl commercial for Planet Fitness. “People are wondering, ‘What’s happened to Lindsay?,’” the ad begins, and then gives updates such as how she’s sleeping more than ever, devastating the paparazzi, and has “traded DUIs for DIYs,” as she bedazzles a home arrest ankle bracelet for Danny Trejo.
When stars like Lohan squander what’s seen to be the height of privilege, however illusory, there’s a very American, puritanical urge to label them as ungrateful – the ultimate celebrity sin, Bennett tells me by phone. “She proved to the public that she was chastened, right?” Bennett says. “It’s something that we demand of our fallen celebrities before they can have access again to the career that we look at them as having abandoned.”
As the 20-something lead party reporter for New York Magazine in the aughts, I had a few personal encounters with Lohan as she navigated the gauntlet of attention and opportunity after 2004’s Mean Girls, which coincided with her entering adulthood. At a party in the Soho Prada store, I unexpectedly found myself escorting Lohan around for what seemed like an inordinately long time. She would have been around 20, and I found her to be a total sweetheart – nervous and curiously focused on talking to me, a reporter she had just met – as photographers and fans crowded around her, all wanting something. What struck me was how lost she seemed, and how I felt compelled to step in, because despite all the people surrounding her and presumably under her employ, no one seemed to be looking out for her.
Some years later during the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, I covered a ridiculous daytime party on a French mountainside accessible only by helicopter or a winding car ride that had made me sick on the way there. As it wound down, I found myself shuffled into the last departing helicopter with Lohan and her posse. Her friends were perfectly nice, but Lohan seemed, understandably, extremely paranoid to have me, a stranger, in the cabin with her. As we touched down a fair distance from town, she and her entourage jumped into the group van the party hosts had hired to shuttle all of us to civilisation and took off, leaving me stranded – annoying and panic-inducing in the moment but pretty funny a few hours later. This was in an era when Lohan was living in London, just after releasing a poorly rated eight-part docuseries with Oprah about trying to reclaim her career and just before her West End debut in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, which got lukewarm reviews that Gilbert points out were all by male critics who, while reluctantly admitting she wasn’t bad, dismissed her out of hand as stunt casting.
She was six trips to rehab deep, and publicly sober, though she had spent that week out at clubs with her younger brother Michael, baiting tabloids by sharing a topless selfie. “There are literally six-months stretches of time where there is a new horrible rumour about her every day of the week,” Bennett said on the Lohan episode of The C-Word.
She had come of age at the least opportune time to be a young starlet with an “ambivalent relationship to underwear,” as Bennett’s co-host Dunham put it, empathetically, while living at the Chateau Marmont during the rise of cellphone cameras, TMZ and Perez Hilton. “In a lot of ways, Lindsay was the Judy Garland of our time, except that we had more tools to destroy her, so we did it faster,” Dunham said.
In the interim between our two encounters, Lohan’s film and TV roles dried up. She had finished out 2004 with Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, a Disney movie in which she staged an intervention for a rock star on drugs. “It’s not a role she could have been convincing in a few years later,” Ditum writes in Toxic. It also contained the first of many times in her career she modelled herself as Marilyn Monroe: in the dream sequence in this film; imitating the famous, demurely nude photographs of Bert Stern for New York Magazine; and completely nude in Playboy, in a replication of Monroe’s pinup shoot for the magazine. They had similar trajectories, both misunderstood comedic actors with sex appeal and dramatic chops, whose artistic potential had faded away as their private struggles played out in public.
But Lohan, improbably, rescued herself. By 2015, she had moved to Dubai, a “safe place,” as she’s called it, where paparazzi are banned and where she became an advocate for Syrian refugees. A year later, while sober, she opened a nightclub in Athens, then another in Mykonos, Greece, documented in the 2019 MTV docuseries Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club. She met her husband when she approached him at a restaurant in Dubai. They talked for two hours, and then she told him, “I feel like you’re the person I’m going to be with forever.” (He financed Irish Wish, which may be why Lohan stuck to exactly one, seemingly contractually mandated kiss in the whole movie.)
Lohan’s career started so impossibly young. She began modelling at 3, appearing in dozens of ad campaigns before she was 10. The oldest of four in a Long Island family, she was raised by her mum, Dina, while her father, Michael, was sentenced to four years in prison when she was 5, following an arrest for stock fraud.
He would go on to be arrested about a dozen times, including when he violated parole by going to Los Angeles to see an 11-year-old Lindsay in the hospital during her big break playing twins in The Parent Trap. Most recently, he was arrested in February on a charge of domestic assault against his ex-wife Kate Majors, and is currently in jail for parole violation while the assault case is pending.
“I feel like a second parent in the sense that I helped raise my family. … I would put myself between [my mother and father a lot] to try to keep the peace, and I felt good doing that,” she told Allure in 2007.
Lohan doesn’t talk about those things much in interviews any more; while she’s in on the joke about her former image, she draws boundaries around the painful past. She’s often said in recent interviews that the biggest lesson she’s learned over the years is how to say no.
But she will talk freely about her old movies, or how she had dreamed of being an actress since she was little, watching Murder, She Wrote while visiting her grandmother or putting on plays starring her dolls, while she imagined she was Shirley Temple. Acting, she told the Sunday Times, had been a form of therapy for her, a way to take everything that was happening in her life, pour it into a character and then release it.
Now, though, she’s found peace in Dubai with her family. She can leave set, go home and release her emotions there.