‘Different’ Lindsay Lohan finds peace in desert
NEW YORK — Lindsay Lohan wants you to know she’s different now.
It’s a word she trots out a couple of dozen times over the course of a half-hour interview, describing her newfound peace since relocating from Los Angeles to Dubai, a “silent, safe place” for the once-embattled actressturned-entrepreneur, where paparazzi are mercifully banned.
“I feel like I can actually breathe,” says Lohan, 32, sitting in a SoHo hotel suite sprinkled with publicists and half-eaten food on a gloomy November evening. “Mentally, my health is different. Everything is just different . ... It’s a different kind of power that I’ve gained, just taking myself out of every [negative] situation that I used to constantly be in.”
MTV’s Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club, which premièred Tueday, aims to show just how much the Mean Girls star has grown since her last reality TV outing: OWN’s short-lived 2014 series Lindsay, which charted her post-rehab recovery and first career comeback attempt with Oprah Winfrey’s guidance.
The new show sidesteps her personal life entirely. Instead, cameras follow Lohan as she expands her European nightclub empire to Mykonos, Greece, with the launch of a luxury beach club. Like Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules, the series gives viewers a firsthand look at what it’s like to manage a bar and restaurant as Lohan and her right-hand man, Panos Spentzos, train and oversee VIP hosts and staff. In the first episode, for instance, Lohan gently scolds her new recruits for drinking all the club’s alcohol.
“The show’s really about me as a businesswoman and me learning how to run this business,” Lohan says. Her employees share equal screen time because “it’s not that fun to watch me all the time — it’s more fun to see the real stuff that I do. Now you get to see it, so it’s a script that I get to direct.”
Beach Club is the former child star’s latest effort to rewrite the salacious narrative that has followed her since the late 2000s, when she became tabloid fodder for her arrests and nights partying with former pals Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. Now, the only people she keeps in touch with from her past are Winfrey and Freaky Friday co-star Jamie Lee Curtis, with whom she checks in every so often for advice.
“I’m a homebody. I find more joy cooking and watching movies” with friends, says Lohan, who spent a rare weekend in New York with sister Ali, brother Michael Jr. and mom Dina. She would like to do more movies — Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Bradley Cooper are on her directors wish list — but prefers working overseas, taking roles in Season 2 of Sick Note, which aired in the U.K. last year, and the upcoming film Frame, which will shoot in Saudi Arabia.
Acting “scared me for a long time, because every time I was doing a movie, people would look at my personal life and that would overshadow the film,” Lohan says. “But [shooting] in London for Sick Note, there was no one around and it was great, and I was like: ‘I’m ready to go again.’ I think I just needed a minute.”
Lohan hasn’t entirely escaped controversy: She drew backlash from fans in 2017 for tweets seemingly supporting U.S. President Donald Trump and last fall for a bizarre Instagram Live video, in which she attempted to “rescue” Syrian refugee children on the street but wound up scuffling with their resistant parents.