KENA BETANCUR / Contributor
‘Never Been Better’! Lindsay Lohan Considers Wild Chapter in Her Life ‘Closed’ Amid Career 2nd Act
How fetch! Twenty years after starring in the original Mean Girls, Lindsay Lohan popped up in a surprise, Mathlete-adjacent cameo in the new movie musical.
The 37-year-old was reportedly paid $500,000 for a half-day’s work to film the scene and showed up on the January 8 premiere’s red carpet in New York City. Asked if she considers herself a “cool mom,” a la the flick’s memorable matriarch, Lindsay, who welcomed son Luai with husband Bader Shammas in July, quipped, “I hope so!”
How times have changed. Once the poster girl for young Hollywood gone bad, the Long Island–born actress has turned her life around in more ways than one. After dropping out of acting and moving to Dubai, over the past few years the former child star has begun both an acting comeback and an image overhaul and is happier than ever.
“She acknowledges that it took a few twists and turns to get to this place,” an insider exclusively tells Life & Style. “But that’s all part of growing up.”
Wild Child
Her childhood was far from normal. A stunningly talented actor, Lindsay broke out in 1998’s The Parent Trap, going on to make such teen classics as Freaky Friday and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. Behind the scenes, however, her life was turbulent.
Bullied at the public school she attended, she was also caught between her warring parents at home. After their 2007 divorce, the actress said she had felt like a “second parent” to her three siblings.
“I was put between my mother and father a lot.” (Both Dina and Michael Lohan have had brushes with the law.) Then there was Lindsay’s own bad behavior.
As one of the 2000s party girls, alongside Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and others, she was snapped stumbling out of clubs. DUIs and rehab stays followed. Her erratic behavior on the set of 2005’s Herbie Fully Loaded made headlines. As recently as 2018, a video of her woozily dancing in Mykonos, Greece, went viral.
“It was so embarrassing,” Lindsay later said. “I was having fun, it was Pride. I was just feeling it.”
Starting Over
That was then. “Lindsay considers that chapter of her life closed,” notes the insider. After moving to Dubai, the actress met financier Bader while out with friends at a restaurant. The pair spoke for hours, Lindsay told Allure.
“And then I said to him, ‘I feel like you’re the person I’m going to be with forever.’ I’d never been able to talk to someone like this.” The pair wed in April 2022 and continue to live in Dubai with their son.
The romance came at the same time as a career resurgence. The 36-year-old proposed while the two were in Utah, where Lindsay was shooting her well-received Netflix movie Falling for Christmas. (She recently wrapped Irish Wish for the streamer.)
“She’s all for doing more movies so long as they have a wholesome message behind them and they don’t conflict with her family life,” says the insider. “She’s all about balance now.”
With Dubai’s strict privacy laws, Lindsay feels free out of the spotlight. “She didn’t want to be a celebrity,” explains the insider. “All she wanted was to have a home, a husband and a family and some measure of stability.”
Lindsay describes her new life in a villa by the beach as calm and orderly. “I really love structure because I don’t think I had that when I was young,” she’s said. “Everything was coming so fast, and I had so many things happening. My only structure was filming and being on set.”
As she dips her toes back into moviemaking, Lindsay’s also thinking about something closer to home: babymaking. “She and Bader have been talking about another baby and they want to make that happen in the next year or two,” says the insider. “Lindsay feels like her life has never been better.”
