After years as a Hollywood teen queen living under a glaring spotlight, Lindsay Lohan built a quieter life in Dubai. Today, the star is fully back in control – and happier than ever
Lindsay Lohan is glowing. Green-juice-drinking, ridiculously-happy, settled-in-her-own-skin glowing. The 39-year-old just wrapped up her Vogue Arabia cover shoot, confidently stepping onto the Jumeirah Burj Al Arab helipad in new-season Loewe, Alaïa and others. “I was nervous to get up there, but it was beautiful,” she says about the 212metre-high platform. Yet it’s immediately obvious this is a star who has been in front of the camera for decades, as she carries herself with ease and self-possession.
Lohan moved to Dubai in 2014 and still calls the city home. It’s where she found peace after years of turbulence – and it’s also where she met her husband, Kuwaiti financier Bader Shammas. “We’re so good together because he’s so calm and I’m like a firecracker,” Lohan laughs. “We have a great balance.” The couple welcomed a son named Luai in July 2023 and are hoping to expand the family soon. “Being in Dubai is very grounding,” she shares. “I get to just spend time with my family. The city gives me a sense of being with what’s most important.” Another noted difference is the privacy and the lack of prying long lenses, especially around her child. “That’s a big breath of fresh air, having to not overthink everything you do every second.”
It’s a stark difference from her previous life as a pop culture phenomenon. After a breakout debut playing twins in 1998’s The Parent Trap, her status as the reigning teen queen of cinema remained unopposed with a string of hits – the 2003 body-swap comedy Freaky Friday with Jamie Lee Curtis, followed by the one-two punch of Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and Mean Girls the following year. In 2006, she graduated to adult romcoms, starring in Just My Luck with Chris Pine. She’s released music, owned a beach club in Greece and won multiple Teen Choice Awards. She was the face of Miu Miu’s spring/summer 2007 campaign, launched her own (now defunct) fashion line in 2008 and was even named artistic adviser of Ungaro for a single season in 2009.
She’s also weathered the toxic storm of being a woman in the 2000s, a time when daring to be fun-loving, beautiful and successful in the public eye meant you were torn down, ridiculed and shamed for every choice, every mistake, every Juicy Couture tracksuit. It was a time of intense and often misogynistic celebrity shaming, with gleeful paparazzi photos of the Y2K princesses splashed across the tabloids. Their downfalls were chased and celebrated – and none more so than Lohan’s. Barely 18 when Mean Girls demolished the box office, she was suddenly everywhere and being judged by everyone. Her notoriety was so ubiquitous that when she was court-ordered to wear an ankle bracelet, Karl Lagerfeld created miniature ankle pouches for Chanel’s spring/summer 2008 collection in a cheeky reference to her legal woes.
It’s only with the hindsight of 20 years that society is starting to reckon with the damage done to young women. Lohan is at peace about that time, now giving herself the grace that was so notably absent in the media back then. “It was all so overwhelming and consuming,” she shares. “I should have listened to my mom and dad and moved back to New York. But I was young and wanted to be in LA. And I didn’t know. So yeah, while a lot of it was fun, it was hard when I was young. It was a double-edged sword. Now I look back and wonder, ‘Why didn’t anyone just go and take me out of there, protect me more?’ You don’t know how to do that yourself when you’re a teenager.” The actress stepped away from the industry, first moving to London to do a play and then settling in Dubai. “I wasn’t having fun in the business anymore,” she shares. “I wasn’t finding roles I loved. It’s not a life I wanted to live, you know? It’s not a real life. It pushed me so far away that I moved to the other side of the world. And I’m so glad I followed my gut.”
She knew she would go back to acting when she started missing it again. This comeback broke the internet in 2022 when she appeared with a new style and refreshed appearance, setting social media alight. She’s coy about this transformation and at almost 40, is quick to credit a healthy diet, “lots of Pilates” and a focus on skincare for her fresh-faced looks. “I’m very skin-conscious,” Lohan says. “After I had my son, with hormones and everything, my skin changed. I had to start using really clean products and I pay attention to it. If I have time during the week, I will go for a facial or do a laser. I’m pro lasers. I think it’s good to take care of the collagen in your skin. And if it feels good, I say, ‘Why not?’ But I have a very basic routine. I use simple products. I don’t like to overdo it and add new things to my routine.” And with her charisma and knack for physical comedy, it was easy to pick up the romcom mantle for the Netflix trifecta – Falling for Christmas (2022), Irish Wish (2024) and Our Little Secret (2024). Lohan turns 40 this year and is sanguine about stepping into the decade when women in Hollywood tend to turn mysteriously invisible. She has formidable footsteps to follow, having shared the screen with heavyweights like Jamie Lee Curtis (twice, with last year’s sequel Freakier Friday also breaking $150 million at the box office), Meryl Streep in A Prairie Home Companion (2006) and Jane Fonda in Georgia Rule (2007). It’s not hard to imagine her career tracking the trajectory set by these uncompromisingly brilliant women. She was an executive producer on her last four films and is clearly on the cusp of fully stepping into her creative power. And what a sight that will be to behold – because try as they might, the tabloids could never deny Lohan’s scorching talent.
“With age comes a different kind of confidence,” she muses. “When I was younger, I wasn’t so comfortable saying how I felt about a character and being involved with the process of it. And I love that part now. I always felt like I had too many people around me and that I was being guided in a different direction. And now it feels good to steer my own ship.” As a young starlet, her agents would give her scripts and if she liked any, she would do it. These days, Lohan is talking to heads of studios, brainstorming ideas and looking for stories everywhere. “I love making happy films. I want people to go see my films and leave feeling great. But I’m at a point in my life where I want to stretch myself and test my boundaries with the roles I play. I’m looking for more dramatic characters with more depth.” First up is her TV debut in the upcoming series Count My Lies. Production is slated to begin in New York this month and the native New Yorker is happy to be shooting in her hometown. “I’m very selective with when and where I shoot because of my husband and son,” she explains. “I don’t want to hang around on set and waste time. I want to get in, do my job and get right home.” Based on the bestselling psychological thriller by Sophie Stava, Lohan plays Violet, a woman whose family is infiltrated by a compulsive liar, but who might be hiding a few secrets herself. Shailene Woodley and Kit Harrington also star in the show. “I’ve always wanted to play the kind of woman who you can’t really figure out,” she says. “Violet reminded me a little of Regina George in Mean Girls. I never got to play that kind of role, so I’m looking forward to it.”
Mean Girls, of course, is the film that launched a thousand memes and catapulted its stars – Lohan, Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried – into the stratosphere. Such is its cultural stickiness that a musical premiered on Broadway in 2018, which was then adapted into another film in 2024. In the 2004 original, Lohan played the lead, Cady Heron, a girl who steps into the wilds of an American high school after years abroad. She remembers the set as “really fun”. “I was rhinestoning phones for people – I had a rhinestoning setup in my trailer and would glue them on in my break. We were just young and having fun; it was like a dream.” That dream is back – and this time on Lohan’s own terms. The noise has faded, the pace has changed and what remains is a woman fully in charge of her life, with joy at the core. “I always like to see the good in things,” she says. “It’s much nicer to live that way. Sometimes my husband is like, ‘You’re so positive.’ And I’m like, ‘I know, isn’t that great?’”
Article first appeared in Vogue
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