Lindsay Lohan: forget those Hilary and Colin rumors—one of the movies' biggest rising stars goes on the record

Interview, June, 2004 by Lynda Obst

After earning praise in last summer's surprise hit Freaky Friday, Lindsay Lohan breaks out her knives, and her acting chops, in the new film Mean Girls. In the Tina Fey-scripted comedy, based on Rosalind Wiseman's best-seller Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence (Three Rivers Press), Lohan's character, Cady Heron, enrolls in a suburban American high school after a lifetime of home-schooling in the African wilds. What follows is an anthropological dissection of contemporary high school culture--its norms and traditions, its food chain and battlegrounds--with the titular villains proving that the lions of the Serengeti have nothing on teenage girls, Here, producer Lynda Obst checks in on the 17-year-old actress's own triumphs and struggles in another jungle--Hollywood--as well as her progress in the school of life.

LYNDA OBST: I know you're not feeling well, so make yourself some tea, get yourself comfy, and let's talk about girls! Mean ones. Girlfriends. Competitiveness. Popularity. Life. High school. Did you even get to go to high school?

LINDSAY LOHAN: Yes. Up until the 11th grade, when I started home-schooling.

LO: So you can relate to the fact that your character in Mean Girls has been home-schooled.

LL: Oh, yeah, totally, though I hadn't really been doing that much home-schooling when I read the script. Initially, I wanted to play the part of Regina [the main "mean girl," played by Rachel McAdams]. But then I thought about it, and I was like, "I don't want my fan base to think I'm a mean girl."

LO: I can understand not wanting to play such an out-there part. Then again, to be the person who gets hit by a bus and everybody cheers ... [Lohan laughs] As it turns out, though, your character goes through all the evolutions of being queen bee.

LL: Yeah, I feel like it's more interesting for me to have a transition and to have people rooting for me. Even when I was mean, I still wanted my character to be likeable.

LO: The moment when Cady becomes the queen bee and realizes she has all the power is so interesting. What did that feel like?

LL: [laughs] I don't know--I was acting! I assume for someone like that who is not really used to being in high school and gets thrown in and gets to that position, it probably feels amazing.

LO: But you're having a year of feeling a lot of power yourself, aren't you?

LL: I don't feel like I have any power. I've been working hard and trying to get to this position, and I feel like people are starting to recognize the stuff that I'm doing, and enjoying it. It makes me feel really good when my little sister and her friends peek inside my bedroom door and stare at me. [laughs] It's cool to have people look up to you. But I'm not in a position yet where I can just be like, "Oh, I want to do this kind of movie."

LO: Was Mean Girls fun to make?

LL: A lot. The director, Mark Waters, is a great guy.

LO: Well, it's just a joyous film to watch. Every moment feels truthful and funny, which is a rare combination.

LL: Yeah. It's hard to find a teen movie you can watch without saying, "No one would ever do that."

LO: I was very taken with the honesty of the jealous moments and the fact that they never feel bitter. They're always funny. I also loved that the point of the movie is that it's not cool to hate. Was Mean Girls close to your own high school experience?

LL: I was more of a floater in high school. I made it a point to get along with everyone because if you're an actress, people assume that you think you're better than everyone else. I wanted to make sure that people had no reason to think that about me. LO: So you were good at politics? You were conscious of the layout of the cafeteria?

LL: I was so conscious of that.

LO: Were there the same social breakdowns that there are in Mean Girls, with the plastics and the queen bees and the locks and the cool Asians and my personal favorite, the girls that eat their feelings?

LL: The cafeteria was kind of like that, with the various tables and the different types.

LO: Were there feuds?

LL: My best friends and I had feuds all the time over guys we liked.

LO: How much do boys play a part in the politics between girls?

LL: Huge. I think some girls get intimidated by each other, and if one person likes another, girls will go out of their way to make their friend's life miserable. Girls will go off the deep end to fight with other girls, and with guys.

LO: When I saw the movie, I thought it was exactly the same as when I went to high school. Girls stick together, but they also tell each other off, they betray each other's secrets, they get into feuds. Of course, your movie is based on the New York Times best-seller Queen Bees and Wannabes and concentrates only on mean girls. We have yet to see the other side: for example, the movie called Bitchy Boys, which might highlight male aggression in the cafeteria of high school life, showing us how jealousy issues among boys plays out--having sex with your best friend's girl, picking fights with the smallest guy on the playground, almost breaking your buddy's neck in a tackle on the football field, the incredibly mean joke in a room full of so-called friends during a poker game, the general tyranny of the strong against the weak, rumors stoked that ruin a reputation, the big against the small (as a short person, I am sensitive to this), the hairy against the hairless, the dumb against the smart, as we see in this movie among girls, too. But back to our subject: Is the jealousy among girls so much higher because the stakes are higher, because pop culture has infiltrated our lives so much?