Lindsay Lohan has had her fair share of ups and downs during her time in the Hollywood spotlight, but the actress told guest interviewer Lauren Hutton in Interview magazine’s February issue that she feels the public is not ready to accept that she’s grown and changed as a result of her past indiscretions.
“You know what’s hard? I want to give back. I want to do all the things that will make me feel fulfilled. But whenever I do those things, people think it’s a press stunt or something,” Lohan told Hutton when asked about the toughest part of celebrity life. “There are things I want to do, and people don’t understand that.”
The 22-year-old believes the media does not focus on her true self, but rather, a “caricature” of Lindsay Lohan.
“I just feel as though it’s become a situation where people have manifested this caricature of who I am, and they act as if there’s no real person inside of it,” she continued. “I mean, people really have come to believe — directors, producers, agents, whoever it may be — that I started in this because I wanted to be a celebrity. But that was never my intention.”
In fact, Lohan's career aspirations were old Hollywood, not the Hollywood of 2009.
“I wanted to be a movie star. But movie stars are not what they used to be. When I was a kid, I thought movie stars were women and men who were in these great films that we still look at now. But I don’t think there are too many films coming out these days that we’re going to look at in the future and say, ‘This is one of the great ones.’” Lohan said.
“What is the great film that I will tell my children about? I’m still going to tell them about the old films, the Hitchcock films. And people my age don’t even know who those people are. I can’t even have a conversation with most people of my generation about that, because they’d be like, ‘OK, she’s a freak. Something’s wrong with her.’”
Slideshow 69 photos
As for her past struggles with drugs and alcohol, the actress told Hutton it was just one short period of her life and she learned a great deal from it.
“I lived maybe six months out of my life like that, doing something wrong, and then I stopped. God forbid I should have ever learned my lesson. But at this point it’s so hard for people to even believe that there was a lesson to be learned at all, because they just think I’m wrong,” Lohan said. “All these people think I’m never going to be right, because it’s more interesting to fabricate this other girl. Who wants to read a tabloid story about a girl who is doing well?”
As for the reasons behind her choices, Lohan said it could be related to her own family.
“And I didn’t even try everything. I was too afraid. The one thing I tried was the wrong thing. And maybe it was just because I’d seen someone else in my family do it — not my mother. But, I don’t know, it really ... It sucks,” she said.
Lohan admits some of the choices she’s made have created a “mess” in her life, and though it’s hard for the public to forget her mistakes, she doesn’t plan on letting her past ruin her future.
“What hurts me the most is that I work just as hard as any other actress around my age, like Scarlett Johansson, but I just don’t get the opportunities that they get because people are so distracted by the mess that I created in my life,” Lohan said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s going to last forever.”