Lindsay Lohan is nervous.
Six months after canceling a shoot in Greece for The New York Times on the same day it was supposed to take place, Lohan has agreed to participate in a full shoot and profile for us. But despite being all in, the actress is wary of opening up.
“I would love to know why I get constantly clobbered in the press,” Lohan says. “I could do 99 things right and one thing wrong, but it’s that one thing that will be focused on. Behind the scenes I do what I can to be the best version of me, which never gets mentioned. I am also human. I make mistakes. That’s all that seems to get reported.”
Lohan’s mistakes are stuff of celebrity folklore, having been reported ad nauseum for decades, her every movement surveilled by men with long lenses. A video shot from a rooftop watching her complete court-ordered community service at an LA morgue comes to mind, as do the infamous “upskirt” shots of herself and contemporaries like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in the early 2000s. At 20 years old, Lohan had already spent a decade in the limelight, having become a household name in 1998 with the release of Disney’s The Parent Trap and a cultural icon following the commercial and cult success of Freaky Friday and Tina Fey’s Mean Girls.
Signed to Ford Models at the age of 3, Lohan appeared in over 60 television commercials before she was 10 years old, including a Jell-O spot with Bill Cosby. “I was always running around my house singing Madonna songs or watching Judy Garland,” she says, noting that she and her grandmother, an early radio soap star, would watch classics like Murder She Wrote and Gone with the Wind together. “I was obsessed with Shirley Temple. Maybe it was just in my genes?”
Ahead of the shoot, Lohan chats with us from her home in Dubai, where she famously moved due in part to its criminalization of paparazzi (she won’t confirm when she moved there, but says it was before 2015). Over the phone, Lohan sounds grounded and prepared, if a little guarded. She’s clearly decided to stay away from topics that have earned her outraged headlines in the past. On whether she pays attention to politics, for instance: “It’s not that much of a thing here [in Dubai]. People don’t emphasize negativity.” Instead, she says, the city is a “health-conscious place” that “promotes positivity and a positive attitude. It’s not like New York, the city that never sleeps.”
All things considered, Dubai makes a lot of sense for Lohan. It provides a swath of protection from the prying eyes of the press and distance from her own ambivalent relationship with America. She can’t remember the last time she set foot in Los Angeles, and even feels nervous going back to her native New York for business trips and family visits. “I’ll feel like I need a greeter and someone to walk me out [of the airport] — if I’m flying alone, if there’s cameras,” she says. Sometimes, her concerns are as relatively simple as not wanting to have her picture taken. (“In the press, if you sneeze, they’ll make it look like you were crying.”) Oftentimes, it’s an even more insidious violation of boundaries. “In America, even once they get the picture, they still follow you. It does bring out a serious kind of anxiety.” She adds that in Mykonos, where one of her Lohan Beach House resorts is located, there are only two paparazzi, and she knows both of them.
The Mykonos resort is the setting and the subject of Lohan’s upcoming Vanderpump Rules-style reality show, Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club airing on MTV on January 8, 2019. Located near the beach where Lohan’s ex-fiancé was filmed assaulting her in 2016, the resort is both Lohan’s powerful reclamation of a painful memory and a savvy business move. On an island known for its all-night parties and Ibiza-style clubs, Lohan Beach House caters to an underserved market: “I really wanted to make it a family-style beach. A place where people can go with their kids and feel safe,” she says. “They can have fun and there’s not cameras every second. It’s not just a party thing; you can have a nice lunch.”
Hospitality makes sense for Lohan, a self-described caretaker with plenty of experience staying in hotels (including living on and off at the Chateau Marmont from 2003-2006). That penchant for nurturing both begins and ends with her family, for whom Lohan Beach House is also a convenient place to gather for the summer. Though she may have put literal distance between herself and the rest of the Lohan clan, it’s clear she’s especially devoted to her three younger siblings. On the phone, she’s quick to mention her 24-year-old sister Ali’s budding music career, and she emphasizes how much she enjoys staying in at night cooking for friends and family. In the ten years since the height of her tabloid fame, Lohan has become something of a homebody.
“I am who I am. I’m a good person,” she says. “I take care of myself. I’m healthy. I like to have fun, but that doesn’t mean I need to go out and drink and be crazy. I have a good relationship with that. It’s funnier to watch other people party. My brother and his wife came out to Mykonos and everyone wanted to go out every night, but I pretty much just went home; some of my friends didn’t want to go out, so they’d come and I’d cook. I like cooking for people and having people over and listening to good music.”
