Lindsay Lohan on Dubai: What the actress has to say about the city she calls home

As she prepares to return for a Freaky Friday sequel, Hollywood star says the emirate helped her learn to appreciate her career again

Lindsay Lohan moved to Dubai in 2014. Reuters

Actress Lindsay Lohan has spoken out about how moving to Dubai in 2014 gave her a new perspective on life and her career.

“I think when you do something for so long, you want to learn to appreciate it again,” the former child star told Entertainment Tonight in an interview posted this week. “And I felt I was craving that. I was like 'I don't want to do it again until I really love it again'. And I needed that. So I waited until I felt it again.”

Stepping away from Hollywood and moving to Dubai helped her find herself, she says. “Just taking a moment. Just to be with me. Just spending time with family. I think that's such an important thing to do.”

Lohan is currently promoting her highly-anticipated reunion with Jamie Lee Curtis for Freakier Friday. The film is a sequel to their hit 2003 film, Freaky Friday, in which they played a mother and daughter who one morning realise they've swapped bodies.

Freaky Friday made more than $160 million worldwide at the box office and paved the way for Lohan's acting career, which includes the 2004 cult classic Mean Girls.

But Lohan's success was soon derailed by a series of career setbacks and multiple stints in rehab in the late 2000s, during which she also became tabloid fodder. She moved to Dubai in 2014 to get “out of the attention of it all”, she told Entertainment Tonight.

Lohan's Freaky Friday co-star Curtis, with whom she has remained close over the years, praised her for having the courage to take a step back from Hollywood and move to the UAE. “I am most impressed she moved to Dubai by herself for five years,” said Curtis, who joined Lohan in the interview. “I kept thinking she met her husband there and I was like 'Oh, did your husband take you to Dubai?'. She said, 'No I went there on my own. I needed to get out of New York'.

“And I said 'Wait a minute, you just lived in Dubai by yourself for five years and she said 'Yeah'. And that made me go 'Oh, I get it'. She needed to find herself. Then she had to step out of it, and now she's back with a vengeance.”

Lohan, who met her Kuwaiti husband Bader Shammas in Dubai in 2020, gave birth to their first child, a boy, last year. The couple, who married in 2022, named their son Luai, which means “shield” or “protector” in Arabic.

Ahead of their son's birth, Lohan gave The National a sneak peek into their Dubai home filled with upcycled furniture and local brands. “I wanted a beautiful and relaxed home for me and my family, with a calming palette of neutrals punctuated with nautical blues,” she said of her design brief to celebrity interior decorator Kate Instone of luxury design firm Blush.

The actress has also shared snippets of her life in the UAE, once saying she found “a peace and a solace that I don't get anywhere else”. She told Extra in 2022: “What I love about Dubai is that there's a sort of serenity that I find there. Maybe it's because it's so far outside the entertainment side of the world.”

In a separate interview with Vogue, she said she “felt a certain sense of calm” after moving to the emirate. “I really found that I had a private life and I could just take time for myself. I decided to stay there because I really learnt to appreciate what it is to go, do my work, and then leave and live a normal life,” she said.

“It took me moving to Dubai to really appreciate the time that I take for myself, instead of just going, going, going and learning to say 'no.' And really putting myself first, and choosing the things that I want to do, wisely, for me first.”

Lohan's career has since seen somewhat of a resurgence, including her appearance in popular films such as Falling for Christmas (2022) and Irish Wish, released in March. Last year, she also starred in an advert that was shot in Dubai to mark a collaboration between fashion brand MCM and Crocs.

Production for Freakier Friday began in June with the film set to be released some time next year.