Dubai Sounds Like a Lovely Place…for Lindsay Lohan!

I hate to invoke the term “Lohanaissance” in earnest, but Lindsay Lohan does actually seem to be in the final phases of her carefully hatched comeback tour, complete with a new profile in Allure.

“Lindsay Lohan Is the Happiest She’s Ever Been,” the headline reads, which is a really lovely thing to learn, given the hell paparazzi put her (and other young women stars) through in the early aughts. Beneath the headline, Lohan is shown in a slow-motion video rubbing her baby bump, hair whipping around her face (objectively speaking, she looks good as hell). In reference to her fast-approaching motherhood, the phrases “her next big project” and “the role of a lifetime” are used liberally, tongue very much in cheek.

In typical celebrity profile fashion, we don’t really learn anything earth-shattering about Lohan. We discover that she is nervous about becoming a working mother, and that her Freaky Friday co-star Jamie Lee Curtis gave her the sage advice: “You just bring the baby with you and everything will be fine.” Speaking of Freaky Friday, we get confirmation that the actors are in talks for a sequel. (We first heard that news in May.) Lohan tells us she would someday like to work with Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro. (What actor wouldn’t?) And we even get a deep reflection on Lohan’s Mykonos chapter, in which she ran a perfectly trashy beach club and starred in an accompanying short-lived reality series to boot: “I had always been going to clubs when I was younger, and I was past that point. But I was like, ‘Well, why can’t we make one?’ I mean, what’s better than that?”

But aside from her bun in the oven, the anchor of Lohan’s newfound happiness seems to be, of all things, Dubai. She loves it! She’s lived there for eight years. She lives in a villa by the beach where the Allure writer catalogs her drinking tea, eating yogurt, throwing back a smoothie, and doing a little workout. “I guess you would say it happened organically,” she tells Allure of her move to the UAE. By organically, she means that she became an expat when she moved to London in 2014, visited Dubai once, decided she liked Dubai better, then moved there. (Yes, that Dubai, which is governed by the United Arab Emirates’ hostile anti-LGBTQ+ laws.)

“Do I want to build my own brand? Do I want to relaunch a new production company? All of these kinds of things I can take time to think about,” she says of Dubai, which “gives me that space to have my own vision of what I need to do next.”

She even met her husband, an assistant vice president at Credit Suisse, at a restaurant in Dubai, which is also the most Dubai thing I’ve ever heard:

Lohan met her husband, financier Bader Shammas, at a Dubai restaurant on a Monday night — she was with friends, he was with colleagues. They chatted briefly. “I said, ‘You look like someone I know.’ He was like, ‘No, I don’t, who?’” The two spoke for hours that night. “And then I said to him, ‘I feel like you’re the person I’m going to be with forever.’ I’d never been able to talk to someone like this.”

Dubai: Safe haven for Lindsay Lohan, crypto bros, obscenely rich people, and almost no one else! I am, truly, happy for her, though.