Lindsay Lohan is nervous.
Six months after canceling a shoot in Greece for TheNew York Times on the same day it was supposed to take place, Lohan has agreed to participate in a full shoot and profile for us. But despite being all in, the actress is wary of opening up.
“I would love to know why I get constantly clobbered in the press,” Lohan says. “I could do 99 things right and one thing wrong, but it’s that one thing that will be focused on. Behind the scenes I do what I can to be the best version of me, which never gets mentioned. I am also human. I make mistakes. That’s all that seems to get reported.”
Lohan’s mistakes are stuff of celebrity folklore, having been reported ad nauseum for decades, her every movement surveilled by men with long lenses. A video shot from a rooftop watching her complete court-ordered community service at an LA morgue comes to mind, as do the infamous “upskirt” shots of herself and contemporaries like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in the early 2000s. At 20 years old, Lohan had already spent a decade in the limelight, having become a household name in 1998 with the release of Disney’s The Parent Trap and a cultural icon following the commercial and cult success of Freaky Friday and Tina Fey’s Mean Girls.
Signed to Ford Models at the age of 3, Lohan appeared in over 60 television commercials before she was 10 years old, including a Jell-O spot with Bill Cosby. “I was always running around my house singing Madonna songs or watching Judy Garland,” she says, noting that she and her grandmother, an early radio soap star, would watch classics like Murder She Wrote and Gone with the Wind together. “I was obsessed with Shirley Temple. Maybe it was just in my genes?”