Actress Lindsay Lohan Set to Diversify Her Film Roles
This summer’s Freakier Friday, the long-awaited sequel to the 2003 comedy Freaky Friday, sees Lindsay Lohan stepping back into her leading role, which is one of the most high-profile ones she’s had since the mid-2000s. But it’s not merely a resurgence to stardom that Lohan is seeking: While a franchise reprise may be the kickoff for her comeback, the actress is fervently hoping to expand her career range as well.
A Long and Fluctuating Career
Now thirty-nine years old, Lindsay Lohan has been acting nearly her entire life. She was only ten when she landed a recurring role on the soap opera Another World; two years later, she rose to silver-screen prominence with her dual (identical-twin) role in 1998’s The Parent Trap. After her teenage, mid-noughties lead roles in Freaky Friday (2003) and Mean Girls (2004), she seemed poised for stardom.
Unfortunately, her career subsequently suffered greatly, due in large part to her struggles with drug addiction, which resulted in numerous legal issues and in her being fired from film projects following reports of erratic on-set behavior. After nearly fifteen years of floating under the radar, she’s begun to resurface in recent years. Netflix, for which she has played the lead roles in three separate films, has referred to its three-movie deal with her as the Lindsay Lohan-aissance.
New Doors to Open – Within Limits?
In her recent interview with The Sunday Times, Lindsay Lohan mentioned that her return to the Friday franchise marked her first role as a mother, which rather coincides with her actual motherhood. (She has a two-year-old son with her husband Bader Shammas). She also expressed the hope that her comeback will be characterized by many more firsts. Referring to movies in general, she remarked: “I miss films that are stories… There are not many major movies I want to go and see that are like that.” She was similarly wistful in regard to her own career, stating that she felt pigeonholed early on and is still struggling “to break that cycle and open doors to something else.”
Yet, at the same time, Lohan feels a strong obligation to maintain a grip on the onscreen persona that she’s built. Her ambition to expand her repertoire is tempered by an equally strong desire to avoid alienating her established fanbase. “I want to respect the people who have kept me here,” she said, explaining that her outlook in this regard isn’t very different from the one she had as a teen star, when she turned down a role as a character who has an abortion because she didn’t want to risk cutting herself off from her innocent screen image.
It’s hard not to find her statements perplexing, if not even a bit self-contradictory. How, I must ask, can Lindsay Lohan expect to circumvent pigeonholing without taking such risks? What kind of happy medium exists between the latter and the former? Perhaps most pertinent of all: Why should she expect her fans to view an extremely subversive new role as disrespectful to her previous work?
Hope for Lindsay Lohan’s Bright Future
Nonetheless, it’s impossible not to root for the “Lindsay Lohan-aissance.” By all accounts, she’s left the lowest point of her life in the rearview mirror, and she’s now striving to attain the highest. The next “first” in the offing is her first starring television role: in the miniseries Count My Lies, which she’s also produced. This upcoming drama will center around a pathological liar (Shailene Woodley) who schemes her way into becoming a nanny for Lohan’s glamorous socialite. Lohan states that she was inspired to take on this project because of her affinity for Gone Girl, and cited Count My Lies as an example of the kinds of stories that she misses seeing onscreen.
Lindsay Lohan is back, and she’s forging a fresh path.
