from www.nbclosangeles.com – A newly surfaced interview with Lindsay Lohan has the troubled starlet talking about playing Linda Lovelace in an upcoming biopic, and it isn’t always clear when she’s talking about Lovelace and when she’s talking about herself.
Lohan will star as the tragically exploited porn star in “Inferno,” with shooting scheduled to begin once Lohan completes 90 days of rehab. And while few have ever known a rock bottom as deep as Lovelace’s, playing a train wreck hardly seems a stretch for Lohan. Listening to her talk about Lovelace just before she went to jail, one wonders if the 24-year-old Lohan is self-aware enough to grasp the irony.
“It just tells the story of this woman that got caught up in this world that she never asked to be involved in,” Lohan says. “It’s like she was this innocent girl that kind of, in a way got trafficked into this situation.”
Lohan started out innocently enough, too. She was as adorable as she was precocious as a 12-year-old in 1998’s “The Parent Trap.” Her star peaked with the release of “Mean Girls” in 2004, and there was reason to believe her talents could take her to the next level, serious acting. But all the while, questions swirled about the motives of the people closest to her. And to date, her only transition to date has been from child star to troubled former child star.
The low point on Lohan’s resume so far has been 2007’s “I Know Who Killed Me,” about a pair of estranged twins, one a talented pianist, the other a down-on-her luck stripper, who are targeted by a serial killer. The roles are an almost perfect metaphor for Lohan herself: the gifted artist/tortured mess.
“Inferno” writer-director Matthew Wilder’s script has been hailed as being very well written, but much has also been made of the fact that the film features “child abuse, three orgasms, two beatings, intense humiliation and a bloody car crash” in the first 32 minutes. And it just gets worse from there.
Could “Inferno” be good? Of course, but it’s all riding on Wilder’s skills as a director, and while you don’t want to judge a man based on one 106-second clip, the not-safe-for-work trailer for his first film, “Your Name Here,” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. What seems more doubtful is that the role will be good for Lohan’s psyche or career.
Roles like Lovelace, women abused in one way or another for their sexuality, require an actress who’s got it together — Charlize Theron in “Monster,” Hillary Swank in “Boys Don’t Cry,” Halle Berry in “Monster’s Ball,” Jodie Foster in “The Accused.” Yes, they’re the roles for which Oscars are won, but not by someone who’s spent about as much time in jail, rehab and court as she has on-set over the past six years. Plumbing such depths can prove punishing to a troubled soul.
Speaking about Chuck Traynor, the monster that was Lovelace’s husband/pimp/manager, Lohan could just as easily be talking about her own demons.
“He was dark and he was was mysterious and he was rough and it was different than anything she’d experienced in life — and girls like that kind of stuff.”