Lindsay Lohan has returned to Hollywood. She’s bringing the peace she’s found — abroad and in marriage and motherhood — with her.
Even in a whisper, Lindsay Lohan’s voice is arrestingly familiar. It’s like you hear her before you see her. As soon as I walk into the designated suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel, there it is, the sonorous rasp that introduced Lohan as a sly beyond her years pre-teen in the Parent Trap, telling me that she’s put her 8-month-old son, Luai, down for a nap. The baby’s in a different suite entirely, with Lohan’s husband, Bader Shammas, but she can’t shake the soft talk.
Luai’s arrival has coincided with Lohan’s most professionally active period in decades. She was six months pregnant when she appeared in the Mean Girls reboot, and Luai and Shammas traveled with Lohan to shoot her third Netflix film, a Christmas movie co-starring Kristin Chenoweth and Tim Meadows. Family life has added an emotional layer to her work. “I had a scene where I was crying, and then my husband surprised me with the baby on set, so then I was crying again, happy tears,” she tells me.Lohan’s appearance — her first in at least a decade — would be one of the Oscars’ biggest headlines. (“It’s giving ‘reclaiming my throne,’” read a Vanity Fair’s Instagram of Lohan in the Mark Seliger studio.) Staid and shimmering on the red carpet in a silver sequin fringe Balenciaga gown, smiling into the flash on the patio, graciously receiving a whispered something from Kim Kardashian
, it was as if she had never stopped acting, moved to Dubai, exited public life. Or like looking at the results of a wishful AI prompt: Lindsay Lohan, healthy, happy, all grown up.
But a few days beforehand, Lohan is nonchalant. “It’ll be like our date night,” she says, adding, “not my husband’s choice of a date night.”
What does Shammas, who works in finance and whom she met at a restaurant in Dubai, think of Lohan’s world?
“He will support me because I’m in it. You know what I mean?” She says she likes to include him in her work because “he’s very intuitive and has a very good understanding of how things are going to work out in the end. He can kind of foresee things. So I like getting his advice on everything and having him be a part of it. I just feel safer.”
It’s as if the peace she’s found abroad, in marriage and motherhood, is what makes her Hollywood re-entry possible. That journey started a decade ago, when she moved from New York to London to star in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow in the West End, and she found herself saying “no” to things for the first time. As a child actor, she says, “They teach you to say ‘yes’ to everything, and that’s not really what life’s all about.”
And Lohan, as prolific a child actor as they come, was plenty good at saying “yes.” Consider the two-year span when a still-teenaged Lohan filmed Freaky Friday, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Mean Girls, and Herbie Fully Loaded, as well as recorded two studio albums, hosted the MTV Movie Awards, and appeared on Saturday Night Live three times. “I was recording an album in my trailer on the set of the movie [Herbie] and promoting the album while shooting, like, TRL,” she says of the period that was so frenetic that Lohan could often only fit in an hour or so of rest. “I remember this so specifically: I had to go to the dentist. I had no time to go to the dentist, but something happened with my tooth. The dentist had to come to see me. It was just so much all the time.” She was eventually hospitalized for a kidney infection.
Lohan’s work schedule was probably more punishing than her partying, though the latter was much more interesting to the press. “I feel like some of [my work] got overshadowed by paparazzi and all that kind of stuff when I was younger, and that’s kind of annoying. I wish that part didn’t happen,” Lohan says. “I feel like that kind of took on a life of its own. So that’s why I wanted to disappear. I was like, ‘Unless there’s no story here, they’re not going to focus on just my work.’”
From the outside, disappearing to Dubai looked like a strategic choice. A place with lucrative business opportunities, a ban on paparazzi, and strict regulations on the substances Lohan struggled with at the height of her fame. But to hear it from Lohan, she stopped working and expatriated in search of the most essential human experience: “I was like, ‘What if I never fall in love? What if this never happens? And it took me just taking time for me for all those doors to open and the ‘yeses’ to come — the things I wanted to say ‘yes’ to.”
Partnership was something she craved, as was motherhood. “I’ve always been close with my younger siblings, and I’ve always had a very maternal instinct,” says the hands-on eldest of four. “The parents kind of give that [responsibility] to [oldest children], too.”
Today, her sister, model-musician Aliana Lohan, is in the adjoining hotel bedroom, along with Lohan’s longtime publicist. The younger Lohan chimes in from time to time, about quarantining in Dubai together (“We looked at each other and we were like, ‘OK, this is it. We don’t want to be stuck with anyone else”) and how she feels about her brother in law (“I love you, always forever,” she sings).
Still, motherhood has changed Lohan in ways that no abundance of older-sister energy could’ve prepared her for. Like how proud she is of her body, and how little pressure she feels to “snap back.” “Everyone’s getting so thin now. I feel like everything always comes full circle again, so this is that moment, and this, too, shall pass. But it does seem like there’s pressure,” she says, referring to the Ozempic era. Yet Lohan — whose own struggles with body image became nearly emblematic of the early 2000s size 0 obsession — is gladly observing this moment from the sidelines. “I was so attached to [Luai] that my last thought was going on a treadmill. I feel like we put so much pressure on ourselves to have to look ‘good’ so soon, but you look so beautiful [postpartum]. Give yourself time.”
These are the types of zen, earnest proclamations Lohan is prone to making now. She seems to have shed the spiky, sarcastic demeanor that served as her shield while navigating a not-so-forgiving Hollywood, whether she was joking about being on probation in a Funny or Die video or schooling David Letterman when he ridiculed her on air. (“We didn’t discuss this in the pre-interview,” she deadpans when the talk show host grills her about going to rehab.)
Today, she tells me she carefully curates what she is exposed to. Online, she avoids fashion: “My stuff is positive manifestations and baby foods.” She likes to be surrounded by “positive people”: “People, places and things I’m a big believer in, and that definitely has shaped more of who I am today.”
Already, there are signs of how intentionally Lohan is approaching Hollywood this time around. For one thing, she isn’t committing to living there. “We’re probably going to start to spend more time here [in the United States],” she says. But as for where the family’s home base will be, “We’re not sure yet. We’re still deciding. We’re looking now.”