Lindsay Lohan: will her talent finally be recognised in the new Freaky Friday movie?

Illustration by Andy Bunday

The 39-year-old actor will soon be seen starring in Freakier Friday, the sequel to the 2003 blockbuster comedy Freaky Friday, in which she body-swapped with her mother (played by Jamie Lee Curtis).

Lohan is back in the Disney mothership where she broke through in 1998 as a 12-year-old child phenomenon, playing twin sisters in The Parent Trap. A multi-project creative partnership deal with Netflix – starting with 2022’s festive film Falling for Christmas – previously eased her re-entry into celebrity echelons.

She is also in newly calm personal territory. She married the Kuwaiti financier Bader Shammas in 2022, and they are mainly based in Dubai with their two-year-old son, Luai. A recent interview in Elle magazine saw a sober and serene Lohan chatting about green tea and pilates.

It’s a PR-regulated galaxy away from the grinding chaos – drugs, partying, bulimia, overspending, riotous love life and professional near-annihilation due to unreliability – that saw her become a cautionary tale for child stardom, rivalling fellow Disney-alumna Britney Spears for the unwanted crown of noisiest celebrity car crash of the noughties and 2010s.

Between 2007 and 2010, Lohan seemed particularly troubled: in and out of rehab, incurring drink-driving charges, setting off the court-ordered alcohol-monitoring device on her ankle, appearing in court 20 times, finally being sentenced to 90 days in prison for violations (she served 13 days).

Before going to prison, she gave an interview to Vanity Fair magazine. “I want my career back,” she said with startling directness. “I want the respect that I had when I was doing great movies.”

This respect – or at least the knowledge that she deserves it – could be the key to Lohan’s determined regenerations.

Even at her tabloid-animal peak, there was no denying the graft that got her there. Like Jodie Foster, even when very young, she  was put to work, modelling from the age of three, for companies including Calvin Klein and Abercrombie, and appearing in TV adverts for everything from Jell-O to Pizza Hut.

Then there was her talent. Freaky Friday made $160m, but Lohan was also esteemed. The Parent Trap’s director, Nancy Meyers, likened her to a young Diane Keaton. Reviewing Freaky Friday, the US film critic Roger Ebert compared her to Jodie Foster.

Those early performances established her as a generational artist. Ben Travis from Empire film magazine also co-produces the Disniversity podcast about Disney history, He tells me that, for younger millennials, Freaky Friday serves as a cornerstone text. “It’s the most 2003 movie ever made. And Lindsay Lohan is the embodiment of 2003 in that film.

“Those films you watch as a young teenager inevitably become part of you,” says Travis. “For my generation, you saw Lindsay Lohan as a kid-kid, a young teenager, an older teenager … You’re following her through your youthful years.”

Patrick Cremona, senior film writer for Radio Times and also a millennial, agrees: “There’s a nostalgia for that era of Lindsay Lohan as a cultural force, starting with The Parent Trap, moving to Freaky Friday and Mean Girls.”

Mean Girls, the pithy Tina Fey-scripted 2004 satire on high-school mores, saw Lohan apparently navigate with ease the notoriously tricky shift out of child acting. Until she didn’t. As early as Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005), there were reports of her on-set “exhaustion”.

Over the ensuing decade, she landed prestige projects such as Robert Altman’s A Prairie Road Companion. But she also gained a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most unreliable hires and morphed into an industry joke. In 2008, nominated for a Golden Raspberry award, she came first and second for her role as a stripper with a dual personality in I Know Who Killed Me.

Ill-advised forays into reality TV didn’t help her battered public image. A five-part series, Lindsay, showed her – overwhelmed – aimlessly wandering around her New York apartment, tripping over mounds of her beloved designer clothes, while Oprah Winfrey – executive producer and Lohan’s mentor – periodically appeared to dispense pep talks. Watching Lindsay is fascinating – a study of post-millennial celebrity disarray – but also saddening. How did A-lister Lohan of Freaky Friday and Mean Girls, the titian-haired girl next door with charismatic fizz, get here, hawking her soul for the reality dollar by showing the world her bruises?

Raised in Long Island, New York, in an Italian-Irish family, she has a turbulent background that is well documented: her father, Michael, served spells in prison (offences related to insider trading, attempted assault and drink driving). He and her mother, Dina (they are now divorced), seemed to desire the limelight themselves. Dina ended up in her own reality show, Living Lohan; Michael gave interviews about his daughter from prison.

Then there was Lohan’s timing: becoming a global star (again like Spears) at a time when the relationship between celebrity, media and public was irrevocably changing. In the new normal of intrusion, abrasion, social media and cameraphones, every misguided stumble and youthful screw-up was not only monitored but also amplified.

Cremona notes that, like others, Lohan was a victim of the feral climate: “And clearly there wasn’t the support for her having been that famous at such a young age.”

In 2014, Lohan played Karen in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, directed by Lindsay Posner at the Playhouse Theatre in London. It remains her only stage role, but the experience seemed to revitalise her creatively, reminding her of her own talent. Someone I know interviewed her around this time and found her vulnerable and understandably wary of the press but also heartbreakingly hopeful for a fresh start.

Is she going to catch a break? All the signs are there: the comeback is under way with Freakier Friday and the Netflix deal; the personal life has stabilised – is it too corny to suggest that she has “body-swapped” with a more mature version of herself? Moreover, the millennial media-public bloodsport – the great tormenting of Lindsay Lohan – appears to have abated.

Both Travis and Cremona mention noticing people “rooting for her”. There is a torrent of goodwill, generational and otherwise, sloshing towards Lohan. It looks as if the Hollywood cautionary tale for child stardom may get her that redemption arc after all.

Lindsay Lohan

Born 2 July 1986

Alma mater Cold Spring Harbor High

Work Actor

Family Parents Dina and Michael Lohan, three siblings