Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | August 13, 2025
Over the weekend, Disney’s Freakier Friday made an impressive $44.5 million worldwide from a $42 million budget. The legacy sequel to a 22-year-old children’s film (itself a remake) was not expected to be a major commercial success, but audiences are apparently eager for a boost of early-2000s nostalgia. It’s a big victory for Disney’s business tactic of remaking and sequel-izing everything, but it’s also the zenith of the long-awaited and eagerly hyped comeback of Lindsay Lohan.
Lohan’s return to the Hollywood mainstream is something of an industry miracle. It wasn’t that long ago that ghoulish bloggers and tabloid rags were all but predicting that Lohan would die before she turned 40, either by her own hand or as part of a nasty accident related to her very public struggles. At the very least, people assumed she’d never return to acting in anything aside from tawdry B-flicks. Now, she’s headlining a Disney movie and the critics are back in her corner. Lohan’s looking gorgeous, happy, and ready to work, with Hollywood holding open its doors for her.
Stuff like this doesn’t happen all that often (unless you’re a man who was accused of hitting a woman, in which case your comeback is as guaranteed as the setting of the sun). The history of the modern entertainment world is littered with examples of people, particularly former child stars, whose falls from grace were gruesomely covered before they were disposed of like a used napkin. For years, Lindsay was seen as just another example of the ‘child star curse,’ a seeming inevitability made worse by the rise of the social media age and the fevered cruelty of 2000s misogyny. Ironically, it’s nostalgia for that era, and a regular cycle of critical re-evaluation of the times, that has helped make Lohan’s comeback possible.
As a child actor in films like The Parent Trap, Lohan was the cute but spunky type who could outsmart the dim-witted adults without her precociousness seeming trite. It helped her to age into some solid adolescent roles. In Freaky Friday, she spends most of the film as the tightly-wound older woman who is trying not to fall apart in the face of teenage angst, and she does a great job playing the straight woman to Jamie Lee Curtis’s slapstick mayhem. The same goes for Mean Girls, where she is the fish-out-of-water new girl who evolves into the ultimate b*tch bully so seamlessly that she herself barely notices the change. The Plastics may get all the funny lines, but it’s Lohan who maintains the emotional heart of the satire of teen hellfire. You watch these films and know instantly why she seemed destined to have a bright future.
We all know what happened next. Lohan fell into the nightlife cycle, one where she was frequently seen alongside, or beefing with, the likes of Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and Britney Spears. Paparazzi waited on the ground to get photos of them without underwear, for which the women were victim-blamed. Reportedly inspired by stylist Rachel Zoe, they all got very thin and were accused of inspiring impressionable young girls to starve themselves. The DUIs started to add up. This moment of rich skinny girls on the party circuit was obsessively detailed by the press and treated as a nationwide sickness. South Park made fun of them as ‘stupid spoiled whores’ while Pink wrote an entire ‘not like other girls’ song on these ‘stupid girls.’
It all began to impact Lohan’s work. She was frequently late to set. Her jump to more adult-oriented projects was deemed unsuccessful. She kept getting arrested and accruing a surprising number of mugshots. Many were still rooting for her, but the performances suffered, like with the trainwreck Lifetime movie Liz & Dick, where she was oddly sleepy and painfully out of her depth in playing Elizabeth Taylor. There were people in her corner, like Oprah effing Winfrey, but Lohan’s struggles kept hindering her ability to get back to normal.
We are not a society with much empathy for addicts or those with mental health struggles. In hindsight, it seems pretty obvious that Lohan was going through something terrible. We knew substances were involved, and that her family issues were endlessly mocked by the press (her father was especially notorious for seeking the spotlight). Frankly, she didn’t look well. But the press never seemed to view her as a victim, or at least a sympathetic one. Much like Britney Spears at her nadir, Lohan was seen as someone whose troubles were entirely her own fault and a symptom of Hollywood selfishness. Don’t pity the poor little rich girl.
Lohan had to go away for a while before she could come back. She moved to Dubai, a place where paparazzi is illegal, and laid low with her now-husband. A deal with Netflix helped to ease her back into the spotlight with fizzy but low-stakes rom-com roles in movies that, let’s be honest, audiences didn’t expect to be masterpieces. They were silly TV movie fare that felt like the kind of romantic comedies we devoured in the early 2000s, when Lohan was up and coming. But what most surprised people was how happy and healthy Lohan seemed. She looked gorgeous, better than she had in years, gave cute interviews where she seemed comfortable with life, and did some fabulous photoshoots. For those of us who remembered her at her thinnest and most gaunt, it was a welcome change.
Honestly, there will always be a small part of me that is just relieved whenever I see a former child star flourishing in the world. The odds are so dishearteningly stacked against them, and it feels like the world roots for them to fail so that we can pretend the ‘child star curse’ isn’t 100% preventable. Often, the culture seems to root for the disaster over helping to avoid it. With Lohan, as with so many who came before her, her life was moulded into a narrative of waste. What a waste of talent, of beauty, of goodwill. It was cruel, of course, but also familiar. The pressures of fame at a young age are seen as a worthy cost to pay for those who survive it. Those who don’t? Well, there will be sympathy for those who die.
It may be this resurgence in goodwill that makes it easier to position Lohan as something more palatable than a real and messy person. Radiant write-ups of her return don’t mention the crypto crap or her being caught on video seemingly trying to kidnap a child. Everyone avoids asking about her changing appearance, even as it’s heralded as the ‘glow-up of the decade.’ Damning reviews of her Netflix rom-coms eagerly note how much Lohan deserves better. This is not to say that we need to reverse our changed minds on Lohan or act as though she should be further scrutinized. It’s merely another reminder that our cultural inability to let women out of the rigid binary of angel/whore leaves us all poorer. We’ve spent a lot of the past decade trying to make up for the misogynistic sins of our past, often in the face of even more anti-woman rhetoric polluting the cultural sphere. We’re picking our battles.
Now that Lohan has had her crowning moment with Freakier Friday, we need to see where she goes next. What roles can she do that are free of the safety net of nostalgia and low-stakes Netflix content? She has a TV series coming up, Count My Lies, a thriller about a compulsive liar that has big ‘domestic peril show starring Nicole Kidman’ energy. The potential is certainly there for Lohan to be more than a nostalgic trope. Surely she and we deserve more than a rose-tinted view of our pasts that overlooks the nastiness that perverted it so?
