She might be Hollywood's latest high-school pin-up but Lindsay Lohan has more than the teen queen card up her sleeve, writes Róisín Ingle
Teen actress Lindsay Lohan is the hot topic of conversation in that powerful barometer of popular culture, the Internet chatroom. You know the kind of thing. Are her breasts real? When does she become "legal"? The object of their ruminations isn't too bothered by this prurience because right now she has more important concerns. "Uuuegh!" yells the pretty redhead, examining her face in a mirror in her suite at London's Dorchester Hotel. "It's green! This had better be gone by tomorrow! What if it isn't gone by tomorrow?"
Seventeen-year-old Lohan - she'll be legal when she turns 18 next week; her breasts are her own business - has just had an all-over spray tan, something she does to disguise her pale skin and freckly arms. These attributes are a gift from her grandfathers, both of whom came from Ireland. "If you could see my real skin through this fake stuff, you would know I was half-Irish," she says, sinking into a sofa wearing a deeply unstarry outfit of grey tracksuit bottoms and a plain black top.
Fake tan issues apart, the star of the latest teen movie Mean Girls and recent presenter of the MTV movie awards is looking pretty pleased with herself. Not since Kirsten Dunst, who has moved on from the teen movie genre, has an actress generated such excitement among Internet chatters and young movie fans.
Lohan, who acquitted herself well in the recent hit Freaky Friday, has come to the fore at a time when there is a dearth of individual, pretty but not too pretty actresses-next-door to fill all those lucrative teen roles with the kind of aplomb that guarantees a smash hit. Critics applaud her comic timing and natural acting ability, while fans and redheads all over the world admire her fresh-faced looks which, crucially, are the kind that endear rather than alienate. For the moment, the future of teen cinema rests on these delicate if slightly green shoulders.
Her latest outing is a cleverly written, quirkily performed piece of work which explores in exquisite detail the high school cliques and teenage social climbing that have been the subject of similar movies from Pretty In Pink to Never Been Kissed, from The Breakfast Club to Election. Based on the non-fiction New York bestseller Queen Bees and Wannabes, it was written by Tina Fey of Saturday Night Live, who also has a cameo role as a maths teacher.
Lohan plays Cady, a wholesome girl who was brought up in the wilds of Africa and has now been transplanted into the Girl World of high school. It's a world which, she soon realises, has more laws than the jungle. Cliques include the Mathletes, the Cool Asians and the Jocks, but Cady is encouraged by two off-beat students to join that terminally shallow group, The Plastics, so she can spy on them and break up their bitchy regime. Problem is, Cady starts to make like a Viking, becoming more Plastic than the Plastics themselves and in the process discovers a dark side of herself she never knew existed.
It's no Heathers, and like most teen movies there's a heavy handed moral end to the glossy tale which is basically, like, you know, love yourself and be good to each other and stuff. But despite a sickly sweet ending involving yet another end-of-year prom dance, it's a hugely enjoyable movie which serves to revive a genre that has been flagging a little of late.
Were there a lot of Mean Girls at Lohan's high school? "I went to school on Long Island in New York and I hung out with a lot of different groups and some of them were mean once in a while," she says. As a member of an after-school art class, an enthusiastic cheerleader and a sports fan, she was what is known in cliquespeak as a Floater.
"Mostly, friends and I got on pretty well, but sometimes we would fight if we liked the same boy or something. American high school is very much like that. Obviously, the movie went that extra mile, but there are jocks and arty people and all of that," she says, before asking what schools are like in Ireland. Her eyes widen when she hears that most of them are single-sex, but she is delighted by the fact that most of us had to wear uniforms.
"I would have loved that," she says. "It would have made things so much easier. My friends would get on the phone to each other every night and say, 'OK, what are you wearing tomorrow?' because we had a lot of the same clothes."
She never, she says, had surreptitious three-way phone chats, a key feature of her latest movie, where friends bitch about each other not knowing that the subject of their conversation is listening on the other line. "Someone did try and get me to do that once but it was so silly I didn't want to get involved," she says.
Lohan began working in the industry at the age of five, encouraged by her mother, a former Rockette, who had connections in the Ford model agency. "I was put up for all these auditions and I kept getting turned down. I remember saying to my mom, if I don't get this next audition I am giving it up, but I did get it and so I carried on," she says. The ad was for sponge mix and she went on to star in commercials for everything from Pizza Hut to jelly-based products.
She has the distinction of being the first red-headed model to get a contract with Ford. "Literally every girl they had on their books at the time had blond hair and blue eyes. It's still like that sometimes," she says, clearly enjoying the fact that her glossy red mane gives her a unique selling point.
At 11, she became a fully-fledged child star when she landed the lead role in Disney's remake of The Parent Trap. Then, again encouraged by her mother, she became a high achieving student and stopped working for a couple of years. "It was important to me just to do the school thing. I think people can get used to being catered for and that's why people in this industry change sometimes," she says. In the intervening years there have been a part in a soap opera, more commercials, and leads in Confessions of a Teenager Drama Queen and Freaky Friday. Mean Girls has seen her crowned Teen Queen of American cinema, an honour she is still getting used to.
"I mean it's weird, especially when I come to Europe where it's all happening at once," she says, marvelling at all the attention. "I used to always want to go to the MTV movie awards and the first time I go, I'm presenting it. I'm saying what? No way! It's awkward with all the rumours. People will always say things and talk about you even if you are not in this business; it's just harder because thousands more people hear about it."
Speaking of rumours, I tell her there is one that Irish women need her to clarify. Did she really make a pass at Colin Farrell? "Oh no, believe me no," she laughs. She has also said rumours of a rift with Hilary Duff, her rival for the teen queen crown, are wildly exaggerated. She did, however, have a pop at Avril Lavigne during a recent Saturday Night Live sketch.
Lohan doesn't think her head will be turned by the showbusiness circus. "It's about the people you have around you," she says. "The people I am with wouldn't let me get that way, they would always tell me. Sometimes I get tired but I just try and relax with my friends, get in a car and just drive somewhere, that's my favourite thing to do."
According to one gushing commentator, Lohan, who admires Brigitte Bardot's dress sense, is "Jodie Foster and Ann-Margaret rolled into one stunning package". Both women happen to be professional role models for Lohan, particularly Foster. "There is a danger of being stereotyped as a teen queen. People such as Jodie Foster didn't have that label. As a young actress she just made the films she wanted to make. I mean she did Taxi Driver at 14," she says, awestruck.
This appreciation of meatier roles has led her to consider taking on the lead in a movie which, if she accepts it, will "set me apart from all other actresses of my generation".
The plot couldn't be further from your average teen movie fodder. "It's about a girl who sees someone being hit by a bus and she thinks it's her fault and she goes off the deep end," says Lohan, lowering her voice conspiratorially. "She has sex with a teacher and then has an abortion and does drugs. I really want to challenge myself but at the same time it's like, do I want to do that kind of thing yet? So it's difficult."
Lohan will be seen next year in another Disney movie, Herbie: Fully Loaded, but the accomplished dancer and singer is also about to record a "dance, hip-hop, kind of Gwen Stefani-style" album. I bring up the controversy associated with Britney Spears's latest tour, where some parents were shocked at the sexually provocative show watched by girls as young as five.
"Well it's hard because Britney can't wait her whole life for her fans to grow up, she has to do what she feels comfortable with," says the actress who, like Britney, has dated the odd boy-band star. "Me, I would do it wearing black suits and stuff. I am not going to say I will never wear a pair of low-slung jeans and a cute top or something but I wouldn't personally feel comfortable in booty shorts and a bra on stage in front of thousands of people because, you know, my 10-year-old sister will call me a slut." The Disneyfication of Lindsay Lohan may be complete but don't expect the Britneyfication of this teenager to happen just yet.
Mean Girls is now showing at cinemas countrywide
