Lindsay Lohan's Second Act
With "Irish Wish," the reclusive icon ramps up her reinvention. Plus: My neighbors from Dublin sound off on Hollywood's Ireland obsession.
Literally the moment Netflix unveiled the poster for the new Lindsay Lohan romantic comedy Irish Wish, I tried to secure an interview with Lohan, who is staging a mid-career comeback in the genre of love. Every so often I contribute to a media outlet whose name you might recognize, and I thought, Well I’ll pitch this interview to my lovely editor there! Well, as it turned out, my thinking was presumptuous. Lohan had already turned down the Famed Media Outlet. Instead, she agreed to a profile in Bustle, a 10-year-old digital women’s magazine with a friendly, approachable vibe that recalls InStyle at its peak. She was drawing a boundary — and making choices to protect herself.
In Lohan’s previous life as a tabloid “trouble doll” (a phrase that the New York Daily News once used to describe her), she couldn’t separate her personal and public selves. The former child actor never went to college but partied like a Tri Delt pre-gaming before a sorority barn dance. She enjoyed being young, famous and talented; but when she went too far, the helpers scattered. She had nobody to break her fall.
The paparazzi made things worse. Their lenses were guns; they wanted to take her down and get rich trying. During the midriff-baring, mid-Aughts, Starlets Behaving Badly was its own cottage industry. Tabloids from TMZ to The New York Post paid millions to publish candid shots of female celebrities at their lowest moments: A tipsy Lohan stumbling on the sidewalk; Britney shaving her head and hitting a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella; Amy Winehouse slurring through a rendition of “Back to Black.” Back then, if you called out the misogyny, the double standard that treated Leo DiCaprio and his infamous Pussy Posse like aspirational figures by comparison, an amoral publisher would have argued, It’s not personal. It’s business. We’re giving the people exactly what they want.
A decade ago, Lohan stopped providing storylines — stateside, at least. She went to London to star in Speed-the-Plow and stayed long after curtain call. Growing up in Hollywood, she told Bustle, she’d been taught to “say yes to everything, and that’s not really what life’s all about.” The word “no” suddenly entered her vocabulary. She moved to Dubai and married a finance guy. (As one does.) Last summer, she gave birth to her son Luai. Her legions of fans were like, That’s so nice. They applauded and moved on. They respected her boundaries.
“I feel like some of [my work] got overshadowed by paparazzi and all that kind of stuff when I was younger, and that’s kind of annoying,” she vented. “I wish that part didn’t happen. I feel like that kind of took on a life of its own. So that’s why I wanted to disappear. I was like, ‘Unless there’s no story here, they’re not going to focus on just my work.’”
These days, she spends a lot more time on set, producing and starring in hit romantic comedies for Netflix. She recently filmed the holiday-themed Our Little Secret (slated to drop this year); it’s her third project with the streamer since 2022’s Falling for Christmas, a cozy charmer where she played an heiress who suffers amnesia after a ski accident and ends up living at a shabby-chic lodge run by a widowed father (Chord Overstreet, my first choice for the lead in The Austin Butler Story: How One Man Stopped Talking Like Elvis — And Learned to Live Again). It was great fun to see Lohan back in her element, on her terms, doing what she does best: Sparkle. The camera, as they say, still loves her and she still manages to combine old-fashioned glamour and Everywoman relatability. Emma Stone, her peer, mirrors both qualities as well as Lohan’s trademark red hair; had Lohan taken a different path, would she have an Oscar or two to her name, like Stone? I think so, yes.
Back to Irish Wish. We all know rom-coms rarely win fancy awards, though from time to time, the really good ones have snuck onto the screenwriting shortlists. Lohan’s latest offering isn’t going for prestige. Or … excellence. She deserves better than a script that has her deliver such left-field lines as “[James] Joyce is my favorite author” while standing atop the Cliffs of Moher and wearing a Madras dress from Miranda Priestly’s nightmares. (A facsimile of that dress hangs somewhere in my closet.) But Irish Wish is silly and sweet, not to mention unintentionally funny, and that’s fine by me. The movie is mere entertainment, nothing more. The scenery: Lush. The plot: Preposterous! Lohan plays Maddie Kelly, a nice-girl pushover not unlike Kate Winslet in The Holiday. She’s a book editor hopelessly in love with her bestselling author Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos), who relied on her to ghostwrite his novel Two Irish Hearts, a title that Nicholas Sparks would find too sentimental. Paul is handsome, shallow and rich; he finds a kindred spirit in Maddie’s materialistic friend Emma (Elizabeth Tan), who reassures, “I don’t have a problem with guys using Botox!”
Despite all evidence that Paul is absolutely insufferable, Maddie remains hung up on him. She travels to Ireland for his wedding to Emma, and before vows are exchanged, she encounters Saint Brigid, the patroness saint of the Emerald Isle, cosplaying Little Edie in a green tunic and purple headscarf. When Brigid grants her a wish, Maddie seizes the opportunity to trade places with Emma, marry Paul and live out her fairytale. She is, in the language of a boilerplate Instagram caption, over the moon. But soon it dawns on her that she’s made a huge mistake: She begins to fancy someone else — her wedding photographer, James (Ed Speleers), a wry, brooding James McAvoy type who’d rather be out in nature, taking photos of exotic animals. Until he meets Maddie. At the Cliffs of Moher, he snaps her portrait and truly sees her as Paul cannot. This scene is the movie’s version of Jack drawing Rose like one of his French girls. Or Clint Eastwood lensing Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison County. The dialogue, though, is very Days of Our Lives:
MADDIE: I’d love to get married up here.
JAMES: Why don’t you?
MADDIE: Because the wedding is this weekend, and I don’t want to be difficult.
JAMES: I’d hardly call having a voice at your own wedding being difficult.
Afterward, they generate palpable steam while playing darts in a pub. They almost kiss. She blurts: “I’m getting married in two days!”
Is she, though???
Come on. You know the ending. You know who Maddie chooses. Because of James, she starts to prefer Guinness over white wine — I mean, that’s a huge giveaway. (Nancy Meyers would never attempt such a plot twist.) And James, well, he’s rather pushy. In a piece of unsolicited advice, he urges Maddie to write her own books rather than toil over Paul’s. He’s not wrong! He’s a helper. He helps her learn to say no. Perhaps that valuable life lesson is what attracted Lohan to an otherwise subpar script. But I’m guessing she mostly just wanted to film in Ireland for six weeks, which I get.
Some friends of mine saw Irish Wish and then shared their grievances: That the impending newlyweds, Maddie and Paul, share a chaste sleeping arrangement. That James, a rootless nomad, is married to his camera and will ditch Maddie the second National Geographic hires him to run its social media. That it is “SO BAD.”
To which I respond: Let us embrace the Lohanaissance and accept her rom-coms for what they are. Without Irish Wish, we would have neither the viral James Joyce one-liner nor Rachel Handler’s delightfully deadpan review in Vulture nor the memorable dartboard flirtation.
Lohan, whenever she feels like it, will always reemerge from her bubble of privacy and give us something to talk about.
Erin on the Street
This morning, I bumped into my neighbors Jack and Grace while walking my daughter to school. They’re from Dublin originally and moved to California a few years ago to work in tech. Shamelessly, I whipped out my phone, where I store my interviews on Rev.com’s app, and pressed “record.” (With permission, of course.) I asked, What do you think about Irish Wish? Jack had only seen the trailer online.
“Awful,” he said, laughing. “Very inauthentic Ireland.”
The accents are all over the place, he said, and he bristled at the sight of Lohan riding a vintage bus that looked as though it had driven out of a period film set in his home country. “The 1940s bus really makes it seem that the U.S. entertainment industry has this very much backwards or not modern” view of Ireland, he said.
Hollywood movies that overly romanticize or stereotype Ireland and its citizens are catering to American audiences, added Grace, who once left a screening of Far and Away in disgust. She cited Wild Mountain Thyme, a romantic dramedy co-starring Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan, as a more recent offender. “That certainly was one that everybody in Ireland watched just to critique it,” Jack said, chiming in.
I explained how Lohan’s character wants to get hitched on the Cliffs of Moher. Their response:
JACK: Impossible. It's like very high winds and yeah, good luck.
GRACE: If you threw a five-euro note over, it'll fly back at you. Yeah. It's just the wind and everything. It's like a tunnel.
JACK: You could probably lean into the wind.
ME: Very unrealistic!
JACK: Yes. Not going to happen. That'd be like getting married on the cliffs of the Grand Canyon.
He observed that “the Irish really love watching the American-made Irish movies to see how bad or how wrong they might get it.” Personally, Jack enjoys the cinematography and spotting familiar locations onscreen.
(As of today, Irish Wish is the No. 1 most-streamed Netflix film in Ireland, reports The Ankler’s Sean McNulty, writing “not a proud moment for my motherland.”)
Grace appreciates Americans’ fondness for Ireland.
“Long may they obsess,” she enthused, adding, “We love it. And they're all very welcome to come and visit anytime.”
“And they can film all the rubbish movies they want from Ireland,” Jack said. “For all intents and purposes, it puts Ireland on the map in a lot of ways, especially in Hollywood entertainment.”
What else I’m watching: Somebody Feed Phil, also on Netflix. Season seven is the best yet. (My kid agrees.)
A book I loved: I was late to the party on Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer. Is it possible to separate an artist from his bad deeds? Dederer wrestles with this timely question over pages and pages. But I kept turning them! This writer fascinates.
A book I pre-ordered: Welcome Home, Courtney Kline by Courtney Preiss. A second-chance romance about a softball player and her first love? You had me at hello.
A Substack I love: Free Happiness by Kirthana Ramisetti. It’s a ray of sunshine in my inbox every Sunday.
Thanks, as ever, for reading. I hope there are signs of Spring wherever you are.
Yours in bouquets of newly sharpened pencils,
Erin (go Bragh)
Chord Overstreet starring in The Austin Butler Story! I was dying at this! Also - thanks for the Free Happiness rec...just subscribed...it looks like such joy!
Thanks for the mention!! And can I say how much I adore Erin on the Street? <3