rewrite this title Exclusive | Lindsay Lohan on new Christmas movie, life in Dubai with husband and son

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Actress Lindsay Lohan is a masterful holiday comedy star, but don’t underestimate how seriously she takes Christmas. Especially now that she’s a mom.

“I’m very nerdy when it comes to wrapping presents,” admits Lohan, via Zoom from her home in Dubai. “I love the art of wrapping. I will wrap any of my friends’ presents — just give it to me. I’ll help.” 

This year, though, there’s an extra incentive to go all out. “For my son, I want to do fun ones,” she says. “If he sees dinosaur wrapping paper, he gets excited. So that’s what’s fun for me — wrapping presents and putting up the tree. And filming every moment of it!” She’ll even bake brownies to make a trail of “dirt” on the floor to accompany the traditional plate of cookies for Santa.

For Lohan, celebrating her son’s second Christmas with financier husband Bader Shammas is a time to bask in the life she’s been cultivating over the past several years. She and Shammas got together in 2020, married in 2022 and welcomed their first child, Luai, last July. 

Fresh-faced in a simple oatmeal-colored tee, with that iconic red hair pulled into a ponytail, Lohan can’t stop smiling as she tells me about the changes that have upended her life in the best way. “It’s no longer about you, really,” she says. “For me, everything is about my child and my family and my household, and making sure that my work is in line with what’s going to work for everyone else.” This year, she fervently hopes to stay home in Dubai for the holidays. “I would like to be settled here, because then I can do everything for the baby.”

Lohan has been up since 6:45 a.m.; that’s when she makes herself some tea, takes a bit of time to write in her journal and tinkers with toddler food. “I came up with new recipes this morning,” she says. “I’m trying this different kind of mashed potatoes and carrots.”

When she’s not nerding out over holidays and recipes, Lohan’s been busy carving out a place as Christmas movie icon — a truly perfect pairing of genre and actor. In Netflix’s “Our Little Secret,” the original “Mean Girls” star draws on her wacky-mix-up chops in a comedy about exes trying to keep their past under wraps. It’s her second Netflix holiday movie outing, after 2022’s “Falling for Christmas,” a throwback delight in which she played an amnesiac socialite working as a hotel maid (think Goldie Hawn in “Overboard,” but Yuletide). 

Lohan’s husky voice and red hair are instant cinematic comfort; she’s the rare actor who just immediately puts you on her side, with a common-sense vibe and a breezy ability to laugh at herself. She radiates a similar charm off-screen as we talk, glowing as she describes the process of making “Our Little Secret” and her dual role as producer on the project.

The movie, for all its comic good cheer, is a little less out there, a little more relationshippy, and Lohan, now 38, appreciates that. “Everyone in it just felt like a real person, nothing was too far-fetched or too, too crazy,” she says. “It’s nice to do something closer to real life situations that people go through. And to play a woman who’s kind of finding herself.”

Lohan loved finding herself completely immersed in the project as a producer, “in terms of the wardrobe, that was a big deal, and seeing the sets early, just really being a part of the whole process from the beginning. And I love the casting.” Her castmates include Tim Meadows — a fellow “Mean Girls” alum — and Kristin Chenoweth, who plays the hilariously imperious mother of Lohan’s character’s new boyfriend. 

The film, which shot in Atlanta, was the first for Lohan as a working mom. “My son was six months old, and so I was learning for the first time really how to go and work and be on set and come home,” she says. “Where I was staying was really close to where we were filming. So it was pretty much just a normal day job, and I felt so blessed for that.”

It’s thrilling for viewers who remember Lohan from her tween/teen turns in “The Parent Trap” and “Freaky Friday” — two of the best-ever film remakes, in this writer’s opinion — to see her in a different stage of life. The actress has lived in Dubai — a country where paparazzi is illegal — since 2014. It was a genius move for a star who was treated, to put it mildly, horrendously by the media during its virulent beating-up-on-young-famous-women era in the early aughts.

Twenty years on, what better time for a “Freaky Friday” sequel? She and Jamie Lee Curtis (who, of course, played Lohan’s mom in the 2003 movie) shot “Freakier Friday” this summer, with a release date set a year later. “It was really fun to play ourselves at a different time of our lives,” Lohan says. “We get to play these characters who’ve evolved, to see where they are now.”

The stars have stayed in touch over the past two decades, something of a rarity in a business. “We’re very close; we were just talking yesterday,” Lohan says. “We have this connection since the original, we’ve always stayed friends. Every day on set was just really exciting for us, and we both felt like teenagers every day. It’s like, is this real? Are we really having this much fun working?”

Few actors have done the dual-role thing as well as Lohan, whose performance as both a rebellious teenager and mom-age Jamie Lee Curtis — trapped in said teenager’s body — was a thing of comedy legend. Her American/British turn in “The Parent Trap” was another master class in duality. Today, Lohan also shuttles between two very different realms of real life: homebody mom and working actor. 

Lohan says she’s become increasingly comfortable with the back-and-forth of shooting films in the US, then leaning into family life in Dubai. “It doesn’t feel like a far trip anymore. If we take the night flight, then I get to New York in the morning, and I don’t get jet lagged or anything. It’s nice to sometimes disconnect from work completely, re-center for a bit and then go back into it.”

She’s found that contemplative lifestyle easier in the UAE. “When I’m in the States, you always feel this need to be out doing something,” she says. “I find that when I’m home and centered and in my safe space, that’s when I actually get more ideas. When I have that quiet time, I feel the most productive, definitely.”

She’s also become a believer in the power of journaling. “I do my manifestation and gratitude journaling every morning,” she says. “It’s one journal, the Five Minute Journal. I always get it as a gift for people, because I swear by it. I think if you set your intentions in the morning, and just have gratitude for the things you have, you don’t lose sight of the simple things in life. I am big on mindfulness.” Momentary mindfulness, anyway: Her son is trying new biscuits today and she’s kind of worrying about it. “I’m like, ‘Don’t take a big bite!’” she says with a nervous laugh. (She’s not a cool mom, she’s a watchful mom.)

On the day of our Alexa cover shoot, Lohan says, “there was such a nice energy. It was so much fun. I like to shoot fast, because then you can get more looks.” She fell in love with one in particular: “The Giambattista Valli long floral dress, because it had pockets, which I loved. It was so elegant and beautiful and modest. It was sexy without having to show skin. We don’t see a lot of that these days. I didn’t feel like I had to be overexposed to feel beautiful and sexy.”

At home in Dubai, she gets a chance to change out of her leggings and T-shirt uniform when friends come to visit, as they often do. “[Hair-color guru] Tracey Cunningham comes here a lot,” Lohan says. “She does my hair and has been a very dear friend of mine for a very long time. She always loves to go to the Gold Souk, and to do touristy stuff. And we go bowling at this place, the Brass Monkey.” Lohan is an avid bowler; who knew? (She doesn’t own her own bowling shoes yet, but as we’re talking, her publicist chimes in with a vow to buy her a Chanel pair for Christmas.) “People also like to go to the Burj Khalifa [the world’s tallest building] to see the top,” Lohan says. She doesn’t join her guests, she says with a laugh, but “I’ll drop them off!”

At the end of the day, though, Lohan covets the moment you come home, close the door and take a deep breath. “I value just taking the time for the normalcy, and just being a mom, not having to go put makeup on every second to go to this or that event. We live in such a world of go, go, go, go, go, and that’s great,” she says. “But you need to have balance. I need longer times of balance, because I need time with my child. That’s really important to me. I’m a mom and a wife first, and then, you know, I have my other stuff.”

Photographer: Greg Swales; Editor: Serena French; Stylist: Anahita Moussavian; Photo Editor: Jessica Hober; Talent Booker: Patty Adams Martinez; Hair: Danielle Priano; Makeup: Kristofer Buckle at Opus Beauty; Manicure: Elle Gerstein at Opus Beauty using Voesh; Fashion Assistants: Jena Beck, Kristi Kruser, Meghan Powers; On-set Assistant: Tiana Schippa; Video: Federica Fortunato