On Lindsay Lohan's Career Pivot

In a post-Lohanaissance landscape, will Lindsay’s prestige days ever come?

Will Lindsay Lohan successfully retcon her career so that the timeline goes Parent Trap, Freaky Friday, Mean Girls… Falling for Christmas? I won’t let them erase the totality of her canon. Though she worked infrequently in the two decades since, Mean Girls catapulted her to the kind of fame no longer even achievable due to the splintering of monoculture and an ecosystem that’s been reengineered to favor the spread of fame, not the heights of it. As such, Lohan’s sporadic on-screen appearances, while perhaps not Academy Award contenders, are certainly worthy of examination. 

Post-Mean Girls, Lohan had leading roles in 2005’s Herbie: Fully Loaded, 2006’s Just My Luck and 2007’s Georgia Rule, as well as supporting turns in Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion and Emilio Estevez’s Bobby. She seemed primed for the kind of career that allowed her to seamlessly move between genres and budgets akin to her contemporaries like Anne Hathaway and Scarlett Johansson. That didn’t turn out to be the case for reasons chronicled ad nauseam — truth enmeshed with hyperbole and gossip — in tabloids, magazines and online. But then, in 2022, Lohan found a home at Netflix and began a career revival spurred by nostalgia, boatloads of public goodwill and a collective belief that this girl’s got talent!

And while it’s a gift having her back in Hollywood (we’ll have had four consecutive years of Lohan on our screens next year), one can’t help but wonder about the latent potential not in Lindsay Lohan the star — that clearly hasn’t dulled — but in Lindsay Lohan the thespian, whom Meryl Streep once called “a terrific actress.” Now that the Lohanaissance is in full swing, let’s look back at her work over the last two decades to determine where the pivot began and speculate on whether Lohan’s days of playing strippers, nuns and… Elizabeth Taylor might ever work their way back into her present-day oeuvre?