Lohan, who was paid $7.5 million for the Lucky project—a big bump up from the $1 million she earned for last year's Mean Girls and for Herbie: Fully Loaded, which hits theaters in June—has suddenly found herself in a different financial bracket than her fellow Hollywood teen queens. But she resents the shadow that her party-girl image has cast on her acting, and she understands how success in the teenybopper market can be a double-edged sword. “There’s become this phenomenon of younger girls buying a lot of tickets,” she says, referring to the success of Mean Girls and, especially, her 2003 blockbuster Freaky Friday. “And so automatically I'm typecast as a teen actress. Other girls my age, like Evan Rachel Wood and Scarlett Johansson and even Mischa Barton, they’ve done riskier roles. And, fashionwise, they become these icons. I could do that, but people won’t take me as seriously, in a way. It’s hard to get around that.”
It would help, certainly, if “Lindsay Lohan Nipple Slip” and similar richly documented low points weren't so Google-able. But as for the drug rumors, Lindsay says they’re false. “Scout’s honor,” she vows, and blows a kiss at the ceiling. “I’m not going to deny the fact that I’ve tried pot. I hated it. But I’ve never tried cocaine. I’ve seen my father, I’ve seen how it messes with families, and, you know, it f---s your life up. If I hadn’t experienced that, I may have gone a different route, I don’t know. But I’ve seen how it literally tore my parents apart. So when my mom calls me saying my dad’s going to announce that I’m doing drugs and then they say that I’m in the hospital for drugs, that really sucks. The thing is, people get to the point where they’re so bloody desperate that they’ll say anything. And you really can’t do anything about it because the more you defend yourself, the more it looks like you’re guilty.”
Lohan says she did not, as people have whispered, leave a walletful of rolled-up dollar bills at Marquee (the New York nightclub whose owner, Noah Tepperberg, is a friend of hers). She does not pal around with fellow nipple-slip victim Tara Reid (“She showed up at dinner in Las Vegas, and Paris said hi to me and didn’t say hi to Tara so she freaked out and was like, ‘I’m going to f---ing kill you!’ And I was like, ‘Hi, I’m Lindsay, nice to meet you’”). She did not proposition Colin Farrell on the Paramount lot when she was still underage (although they “hung out at a club,” she says. “I guess we were spotted kissing. But it wasn’t such a bad rumor to have!”). She has not tried to seduce Mark Wahlberg or Jude Law, who has also been filming in New Orleans (“When they say, ‘Oh, she likes Jude but he’s engaged to Sienna now’—I know my dad’s cheated on my mom, and I could never be that person”). And she did not kiss anybody at P. Diddy’s New Year's party in South Beach—although she had a very civil hello with That ‘70s Show’s Wilmer Valderrama, her ex-boyfriend, who sat alone by the pool.
