A Look Back at Lindsay Lohan’s Comeback

It’s official: Lindsay Lohan has wrapped filming on the long-awaited sequel to Disney’s Freaky Friday with Jamie Lee Curtis (titled, appropriately, Freakier Friday), which will be released in theaters next year. The film will mark Lohan’s first outing at the box office since her freaky-in-a-different-way turn in Paul Schrader’s The Canyons in 2013. (Remember that whole thing?) That Lohan, now 38, is happily plugged back into the Disney machine — she made one of the most-talked-about appearances at the D23 fan conference last month — is almost unbelievable. How did this happen?

Perhaps we should thank the pandemic. After years and years of not exactly having it together, Lohan finally started tracking back toward movie stardom ca. 2020. She met her now-husband, the relatively anonymous Credit Suisse banker Bader Shammas, in Dubai, where she has lived on and off for years. The couple announced their engagement over Thanksgiving weekend in 2021, and at the same time, Netflix announced that Lohan would star in an upcoming Christmas movie with former Glee star Chord Overstreet. A wedding and a somewhat-random-but-still-high-profile project in the works? The Lohaniacs had something they hadn’t had in a long time: hope.

Falling for Christmas premiered in 2022 and quickly went to No. 1 on Netflix. The success of the film, in which Lohan plays a Paris Hilton–esque hotel heiress, gave her an opportunity to star in Christmas-themed ads for Pepsi. (Not Coke but, you know, the next best thing.) By the end of 2022, Lohan was a married Netflix star with a baby on the way. She announced she was pregnant on Instagram in March 2023.

The pregnancy opened a whole new avenue of work for Lohan. She posed for the cover of Allure while pregnant and curated a line of nursery items for the chic baby-furniture brand Nestig. “I wanted everything to be calming but also playful, really tapping into childlike wonder,” she said of the collab, sounding shockingly like a boring A-lister again. (“This is how you throw a party in Mykonos, bitch,” this was not.)

During 2023, Lohan worked on another rom-com for Netflix, this time a St. Patrick’s Day–themed joint called Irish Wish. Despite the fact that Vulture called the film a “crypto-fascist, AI-generated harbinger of doom” in its review, the movie also went to No. 1 when it was released this past March. More important, it brought Lohan some A-list friends: Her co-star Ayesha Curry became her son Luai’s godmother (and Curry’s NBA-star husband, Steph Curry, became the godfather).

Throughout the past two years, Lohan has also started working with big-name stylists again. First, she hired Law Roach for her Falling for Christmas promo cycle — he dressed her in Versace leather and Valentino florals for various appearances. Now, she appears to be working with J.Lo’s preferred stylist, Rob Zangardi, who put her in a sheer lime-green Jil Sander gown for the D23 conference last month. Kardashian-favorite makeup artist Ash K. Holm is doing her glam, and Danielle Priano is styling her strawberry-blonde-ish hair.

But the industry player who has supported Lohan the most in her comeback is, of course, Curtis. In 2023, she sat with Lohan for a New York Times interview tied to the 20th anniversary of Freaky Friday, and she has always spoken positively about her throughout the process of getting the sequel made, calling Lohan her “ultimate movie daughter.” In an interview with Variety last month, she even suggested that Lohan has become a strict parent in real life.

“Lindsay’s a mommy,” she said. “Little Luai just had his first birthday a week ago. It changes you as a human, being a parent. She’s very conservative, so I was like, ‘Relax. Relax.’”

Lohan and Curtis wrapped filming on Freakier Friday last month — but not before filming an on-trend “demure”-meme video. Lohan then graciously thanked everyone involved with the movie on Instagram.

“I’m so grateful to have made this film, a story of family, mothers and their children and a film filled with love, laughter and a ton of heart!” she wrote. Another statement so anodyne I could cry. Welcome back, LiLo.