CEBU, Philippines - Lindsay Lohan admits that it was pretty much London or bust for her when she decided to move across the pond.
“I can go for a run here on my own,” the embattled star of screen and now the stage said during a recent sit-down with The Guardian’s Observer.
“I do every morning, early, and I think how my friends in New York would still be up partying at that time. I needed to grow up and London is a better place for me to do that than anywhere else.”
Recalling how her Los Angeles friends were all about partying and the paparazzi followed her everywhere, Lohan — who’s been performing to largely optimistic reviews in a revival of David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow”— said that her L.A. days are behind her.
“I won’t live in L.A. again, hell no,” she said. “My friends tell me [expletive] when they come over I don’t want to hear. I don’t even know who got married and who got pregnant. You turn on the news in L.A. and it is all gossip about people. All the stuff that is going on in the world right now and this gossip is the news? I love the BBC. I haven’t heard myself mentioned on TV since I have been here. That has been really weird for me, and great.”
Lohan said that in addition to Mamet, Al Pacino also encouraged her to take her role in “Speed-the-Plow” and then helped her develop a pre- and post-performance routine, which includes meditation before she goes on stage. The 28-year-old said that she has also learned how to be more reliable, even going on stage once after coming down with a bug and vomiting all day because she didn’t want to miss a show.
“I was sitting there beforehand seeing spots in front of my eyes,” she recalled. “I had a plan: if I felt sick on stage I was going to faint, play dead, pretend it was part of the script. Didn’t happen fortunately.”
Lohan also acknowledged that her turning point toward the better did coincide with being taken under Oprah Winfrey’s wing when she shot her OWN docu-series.
Oprah gave her the self-help book “The Untethered Soul,” and the actress credits that as well with helping to muffle her destructive side.
“There is a chapter called ‘The Rose and the Thorn,’” Lohan said. “You sit on a couch, and you imagine that voice in your head as a person next to you. You learn how to distance yourself from that person.”