Actress Lindsay Lohan is a master star of holiday comedy, but don’t underestimate how seriously she takes Christmas. Especially now that she is a mother.
“I’m very nervous when it comes to wrapping presents,” admits Lohan, via Zoom from her home in Dubai. “I love the art of wrapping. I will close any of my friends gifts – just give it to me. I will help.”
This year, however, there’s an extra incentive to go all out. “For my son, I want to have fun,” she says. “If you see wrapping paper with dinosaurs, you get excited. So that’s what’s fun for me – wrapping presents and putting up the tree. And filming every moment of it!” She will even bake brownies to make a trail of “dirt” on the floor to accompany the traditional Santa cookie dish.
For Lohan, celebrating her son’s second Christmas with financier husband Bader Shammas is a time to bask in the life she’s cultivated over the past few years. She and Shammas got together in 2020, married in 2022 and welcomed their first child, Luai, last July.
Fresh-faced in a simple oatmeal t-shirt, with her iconic red hair pulled back in a ponytail, Lohan can’t stop laughing as she tells me about the changes that have turned her life upside down for the best. “It’s not about you anymore, really,” she says. “For me, it’s all about my baby, my family and my family, and making sure that my work is consistent with what’s going to work for everyone else.” This year, she is fervently hoping to stay home in Dubai for the holidays. “I would like to settle here, because then I can do everything for the child.”
Lohan has been up since 6:45; that’s when she makes herself a cup of tea, takes some time to write in her journal, and tins the baby food. “I came in with new recipes this morning,” she says. “I’m trying this different kind of mashed potatoes and carrots.”
When she’s not worrying about the holidays and recipes, Lohan has been busy carving out a niche as a Christmas movie icon—a truly perfect pairing of genre and actor. In Netflix’s Our Little Secret, the original Mean Girls star draws on her quirky combinations in a comedy about exes trying to keep their pasts a secret. It’s her second holiday movie outing on Netflix, following 2022’s “Falling for Christmas,” a throwback delight in which she played an amnesiac socialite working as a hotel maid (think Goldie Hawn in “Overboard,” but Yuletide).
Lohan’s husky voice and red hair are instant cinematic comfort; she is the rare actor who just immediately puts you on her side, with a reasonable vibe and a refreshing ability to laugh at yourself. She radiates a similar charm off-screen as we speak, beaming as she describes the process of making Our Little Secret and her dual role as producer on the project.
The film, for all its comic glee, is a little less out there, a little more relatable, and Lohan, now 38, appreciates that. “Everyone in it just felt like a real person, nothing was too far-fetched or too crazy,” she says. “It’s nice to do something closer to real-life situations that people go through. And to play a woman who is finding herself.”
Lohan loved finding herself fully immersed in the project as a producer, “wardrobe-wise, that was a big deal, and seeing the sets early, just really being a part of the whole process from the beginning. And I love the casting.” Her co-stars include Tim Meadows — a “Mean Girls” castmate — and Kristin Chenoweth, who plays the mother of Lohan’s character’s new boyfriend.
The film, which was shot in Atlanta, was Lohan’s first as a working mother. “My son was six months old, and so I was learning for the first time how to go, work, be on set and come home,” she says. “Where I was staying was very close to where we were filming. So it was pretty much a normal day job and I felt very blessed for that.”
It’s exciting for viewers who remember Lohan from her tween/teen turns in The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday—two of the best movie remakes, in this writer’s opinion—to see her in another phase of her life. life. The actress has been living in Dubai – a country where paparazzi are illegal – since 2014. It was a genius move for a star who was treated, to put it mildly, terribly by the media during its virulent era of bashing of young famous women in the early years.
Twenty years later, what better time for a Freaky Friday sequel? She and Jamie Lee Curtis (who, of course, played Lohan’s mother in the 2003 film) shot Freakier Friday this summer, with a release date set for a year later. “It was really fun to play ourselves at a different time in our lives,” says Lohan. “We got to play these characters that have evolved, to see where they are now.”
The stars have stayed in touch over the past two decades, a rarity in a business. “We are very close; we were just talking yesterday,” says Lohan. “We have this relationship since the original, we have always remained friends. Every day on set was really exciting for us and we both felt like teenagers every day. It’s like, is this real? Are we really enjoying working that much?”
Few actors have pulled off the double role as well as Lohan, whose performance as both a rebellious teenager and a Jamie Lee Curtis-aged mother — trapped in said teenager’s body — was the stuff of comedy legend. Her American/British turn in The Parent Trap was another master class in duality. Today, Lohan also juggles two very different realms of real life: stay-at-home mom and working actor.
Lohan says she has become increasingly comfortable filming in the US, then leaning into family life in Dubai. “It doesn’t seem like a long journey anymore. If we take the night flight, then I get to New York in the morning, and I’m not stuck or anything. It’s good sometimes to completely disconnect from work, refocus for a bit, and then come back to it.”
She has found that meditative lifestyle easier in the UAE. “When I’m in the States, you always feel this need to be outside doing something,” she says. “I find that when I’m at home and focused and in my own safe space, that’s when I actually get more ideas. When I have that quiet time, I feel more productive, definitely.”
She has also become a believer in the power of journaling. “I do my manifesting and my gratitude journal every morning,” she says. “It’s a diary, the Five Minute Diary. I always get it as a gift for people because I swear by it. I think if you set your goals in the morning and just be grateful for the things you have, you don’t miss the simple things in life. I’m big on awareness.” Momentary note, anyway: Her son is trying new cookies today, and she’s kind of worried about it. “I’m like, ‘Don’t take a big bite!'” she says with a nervous laugh. (She’s not a cool mom, she’s a watchful mom.)
On the day of our Alexa cover shoot, Lohan says, “there was such a good energy. It was a lot of fun. I like to shoot fast because then you can get more shots.” She fell in love with one in particular: “The long Giambattista Valli floral dress because it had pockets, which I loved. It was so elegant, beautiful and modest. It was sexy without having to show skin. We don’t see that much these days. I didn’t feel like I had to expose myself to feel beautiful and sexy.”
At her home in Dubai, she gets a chance to change out of her leggings and T-shirt uniform when friends come to visit, as they often do. “[Hair-color guru] Tracey Cunningham comes here a lot,” says Lohan. “She does my hair and has been a very dear friend of mine for a very long time. She always likes to go to the Gold Market and do touristy things. And we go bowling in this place, brass monkey.” Lohan is an avid gamer; who knew (She doesn’t have her bowling shoes yet, but as we speak, her publicist chimes in with a pledge to buy her a pair of Chanels for Christmas.) “People also like to go to the Burj Khalifa [the world’s tallest building] to see the top,” says Lohan. She doesn’t join her guests, she says with a laugh, but “I’ll let them!”
At the end of the day, though, Lohan craves the moment when you get home, close the door, and take a deep breath. “I appreciate taking time for normality, and just being a mom, not having to go put on makeup every second to go to this or that event. We live in a go, go, go, go, go world, and that’s great,” she says. “But you have to have balance. I need longer balance times because I need time with my child. This is really important to me. I’m a mother and a wife first, and then, you know, I have my other things.”
Photograph: Greg Swales; Editor: French Serena; Stylist: Anahita Moussavian; Photo editor: Jessica Hober; Talent booking: Patty Adams Martinez; Hair: Danielle Priano; Makeup: Christopher Buckle at Opus Beauty; Manicure: Elle Gerstein at Opus Beauty using Voesh; Fashion assistants: Jena Beck, Kristi Kruser, Meghan Powers; Assistant on set: Tiana Schippa; Video: Federica Fortunato
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Image Source : nypost.com