Lindsay Lohan is reflecting on the cost of spending her formative years in the spotlight.
“I don’t ever want my family to experience being chased by the paparazzi the way I was,” Lohan, 39, told The Times of London in a Saturday, August 2, profile. “They were terrifying moments I had in my life. I have PTSD to the extreme from those things.”
Lohan started acting in 1998, when she landed her breakout role in The Parent Trap. Since then, she has been at the center of often relentless media attention. Speaking to The Times, Lohan recalled dealing with “really scary” and “the most invasive situations.”
“I pray stuff like that never comes back,” she said. “It’s not safe. It’s not fair.”
Lohan, who was born in New York and later lived in Los Angeles, has since moved to Dubai, where she met now-husband Bader Shammas. The pair reside in the United Arab Emirates with their 2-year-old son, Luai.
“I lived like that and it’s not who I am. Dubai is a safe place where we can just have a normal life, outside of what I call ‘the noise,’” Lohan explained to the British newspaper. “[It is] where my husband and I can see what is right for our child. It’s not about me anymore.”
Lohan and Shammas, 38, have also made a conscious decision to keep Luai out of the limelight, opting against sharing photos of his face on social media.
“It’s something my husband and I discuss all the time. ‘Do we want to show our son?’” she said. “We will know when the time might be right, but it’s also a protection.”
The Freakier Friday actress added, “Kids are so pure, such a clean slate, and they are learning everything for the first time — it is beautiful. I want to relive those moments with my son, like I have never seen them before.”
It is Luai, in part, who inspired Lohan to reprise her Freaky Friday role in the long-awaited sequel.
“Jamie [Lee Curtis] mentioned the idea when I was pregnant and I was like, ‘Well, not right this second,’” Lohan quipped of her onscreen mother.
In the 2003 film, Lohan’s character was 16 and switched bodies with Curtis’ onscreen persona. In the follow-up flick, Lohan’s Anna Coleman is now a single mother and changes places with her own teenage child. Curtis’ Tess, meanwhile, swaps positions with Anna’s soon-to-be British stepdaughter. Freakier Friday is the first time that Lohan has played a mother onscreen.
“Yes, this is a first,” she quipped to The Times. “It’s timing. Time is working on my side, which is great.”
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