With the savvy satire Mean Girls, Lindsay Lohan has become the high school heroine du jour, discovers Lesley O’Toole
“I hate my freckles, I hate my red hair and I always think I’m overweight when I see myself on screen,” says Lindsay Lohan, masquerading for a moment as an insecure 17-year-old. She is, of course, anything but. Lohan is Hollywood’s current teen doyenne, its “go-to” girl when a savvy high-schooler is needed. Ironically, the success of her new film, Mean Girls — the best teen satire since Heathers in 1989 — means she’ll be able to leave that behind and go for the challenging roles she craves.
Mean Girls, based on Rosalind Wiseman’s book Queen Bees & Wannabees, was written by Saturday Night Live’s head writer and star, Tina Fey. It’s smart and ferociously funny. Lohan is Cady Heron, a 15-year-old who has never seen the inside of an American high school, having spent her formative years with her zoologist parents in Africa. The shy new girl does everything she thinks she should to fit in, hanging with the Plastics — a beautiful threesome and the school’s Queen Bees — initially as a Fifth Columnist, but soon getting seduced by her ensuing popularity. The film has earned $78 million to date in the US, which is remarkable for a low-key comedy in a summer of blockbusters.
So which clique did Lohan herself belong to at high school? “I was what people called a floater,” Lohan replies, “because I was friends with everyone. I was very social. The last school I went to really had those cliques though — there was the cheerleading team who all hung out together, the people who took art. It was weird how people segregated themselves. I always thought: ‘What’s the point?’” Was she the cheerleader or the artist?
“Both. I did really well at art,
I can say that. But I also did cheerleading, basketball, soccer and lacrosse. I
played sports and mixed it up.” In conversation, Lohan comes across as a fairly typical teenage girl, though the absence of “like” from her speech marks her out as well educated. She’s remarkably levelheaded, too, presumably because she balanced her early film career with regular high school in Long Island, just outside New York, where she still lives and where, she says, her friends are entirely “unaffected” by her career.
A Ford model from the age of five, Lohan’s first acting job was on the daytime soap Another World, before she won the dual roles of separated-at-birth twins in Disney’s 1998 remake of The Parent Trap, alongside Natasha Richardson and Dennis Quaid. Having auditioned thousands of girls for the part, Disney’s honchos were so impressed with the 11-year-old actress that they promptly signed Lohan to a three-picture deal.
But after the film’s seven-month shoot, Lohan ran screaming back to girlhood. “I felt as if I never wanted to act again after that. I couldn’t wait to get back to school and be a normal girl. I hadn’t even told my schoolfriends I was away doing a movie. They had no idea why I left for so long. I still don’t like talking to friends about my films. What could I say? ‘I was making a movie.’ How obnoxious!” But the acting bug returned eventually. She starred in a couple of short-lived TV series before Freaky Friday (2001), another Disney remake which not only heralded her comeback in no uncertain terms (it took $110 million in the US alone), but also saw her playing a challenging dual role once more. The Parent Trap had evidently been no fluke.
Its success, however, was not enough to overcome the unbridled insecurity that is a teenager’s lot — even a teenaged film star. “I was trying to dye my hair blonde, although my mum tried to stop me. (Her mother comanages her career, her father is an investment banker.) I just wanted to look like everyone else. You do see what’s out there and feel that you have to look a certain way and dress a certain way and be a certain weight. I’m finally starting to realise that I can do my own thing.”
Today, she is unashamedly red-haired and considerably more womanly than even a few months ago. Then she was cute, now she has a burgeoning beauty. She insists that she will never be anything else but proudly curvy. “The camera does put weight on you. I know that. But I can’t not eat. I love food too much. I could never look like Lara Flynn Boyle.”
Hilariously, those impressive curves caused her some recent aggravation when a photo printed in a British tabloid prompted a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon to announce that she had almost certainly had breast augmentation. She was apoplectic. “I’m 17!” shrieked a horrified Lohan. Certainly, it is impossible to believe that this immensely likeable and unactressy young woman would have resorted to such a thing. Lohan is all about being true to herself.
She talks of recently meeting one of her Hollywood crushes, Ashton Kutcher (Orlando Bloom is his rival for her affections), and flinches at my suggestion that she might have got giggly while talking to him.
“Oh, I hate it when people do that to me. Actors are just doing their job and
they get recognised because people enjoy watching them. But some people make
such a big deal when they see them, crying and stuff. It’s amazing to me.” And then Lohan clicks back into 17-year-old mode, decrying the fact that she’s never had a serious boyfriend and is attracted only to older guys such as Kutcher and Bloom. “And that’s not legal for me, my friend!” she wisecracks.
She attributes her maturity less to working in a predominantly adult world than to being the eldest of four siblings. “I feel I’ve had to grow up faster because of that rather than the business, and I kind of like it because my friends are still going through that ‘needing to go to parties and get really drunk’ phase. I’d rather be the designated driver and be in control of where I’m going and what I’m doing.”
To that end, she intends to study entertainment law — “so that I can at least check my own contracts”. She also signed a record deal with Gloria Estefan’s husband, Emilio, in 2002, but isn’t planning on rush-releasing an album any time soon. “I’m already getting that ‘just because she’s an actress she thinks she can sing, too,’ thing. So I’ve kind of been dragging with my music a bit. I’m scared to come out with it yet and I’d rather wait until I’m more established as an actress. I haven’t really shown what I can do yet.”
She is already signed up to another Disney remake, of the 1969 classic The Love Bug. Beyond that, she’s open to offers — which won’t be long in coming.
“I want to do a film that shows a different side of my abilities,” she says, fiddling with her slightly chipped manicure. She aspires to roles such as Jodie Foster’s in The Silence of the Lambs and insists she’s not averse to wading into murkier, more thespian waters.
“I just want to do something completely different and really rock at it. You can only do the same thing for so long.”