Smash hit

The cliques and characters in the movie were familiar to Lohan. “When I switched schools in the 10th grade, there was a group kind of like the Plastics. They were mean.” She was raised in Long Island, the oldest of four, to an investment banker and a former Radio City Rockette. She was a Ford model at three, and appeared in more than 60 television commercials. “The first one I did, I got really sick, because I kept eating the cake batter,” she says. “Then I went into a soap opera, Another World. I’d always wanted to act. It was fun for me.”

The Parent Trap (a Disney remake of the 1961 film starring Hayley Mills), in which she played estranged twin sisters, was her first movie. Smartly, she, or more likely her mum, Dina, turned down a part in the lamentable Inspector Gadget, and she went back to school for three years. “It kept me grounded, made me have real friends. The only thing I haven’t done from high school is go to a prom. I was working. My mum is always, like (she puts on an adult voice), ‘The second I see a difference is the second you are not doing this.’”

After a couple of television dramas and a pilot for a Bette Midler sitcom, her next Disney film role was Freaky Friday (Jodie Foster starred in the original), with Jamie Lee Curtis. Made for just over $20m, it grossed $110m in North America, plus $50m internationally, and is a top seller on DVD. The director, Mark Waters, was determined to get her on board again for Mean Girls. It helped that she is the only teen star out there with both the drawing power and the range as an actor.

“Everybody does their own thing,” says Lohan, neatly sidestepping potential feud territory (last year, she and Duff were reported to be in a spat after both dated Aaron Carter, a teen pop star so anaemic, he makes Gareth Gates look vibrant). “A lot of girls feel competitive, which is silly. It is so draining, having to think about what somebody else is doing. I am comfortable with my choices. I want to be in this business for a long time.”

She is not yet ready to follow Foster into darker territory, but will doubtless be keeping an eye on Anne Hathaway’s progress: the 21-year-old star of The Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted has already made two grown-up films. Lohan is playing it safe with two more high-school movies, Gossip Girl and Dramarama — both, she says, have good scripts — as well as Herbie, a remake of The Love Bug. “It will be a little bit different for me,” she says with a straight face. “I have to play a 20-year-old. I try to do roles that people can connect with, but I am scared to do that one film that is completely different.

There’s a way of doing something different at the appropriate time.”

Her conversation may be larded with teen speak, especially when discussing her navel piercing, but she is far older than her years. Her favourite movies are Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Silence of the Lambs, Some Like It Hot and Viva Las Vegas. Inevitably, she is planning to record an album, and has written a song with the radio-friendly hit factory Diane Warren. Lohan is 18 on July 2, but she is already a small industry. She now lives in LA and has been spotted out partying, chatting up Colin Farrell and, the most heinous crime of all, smoking a cigarette. Her suddenly substantial cleavage has also attracted its own rumours.

“Oh, gosh. I started to get a chest and it’s, like, people didn’t expect it,” she laughs. “I’ve grown out, rather than up. I wanted to be a little bit sexier, to dress a little more revealing, and suddenly, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, she got implants.’ I’m 17 years old and deathly afraid of putting something in my body. I would never do that — my mum wouldn’t let me. But please make up a rumour about me getting implants instead of saying something terrible, like I’m doing drugs.”

In May, when she hosted Saturday Night Live, she wittily deflated the gossip in a Harry Potter sketch. She played Hermione, who came back to school having developed a large chest, “which distracted everybody somewhat”. It won’t be the last time. “Lindsay,” says Fey, “has been performing for so long, she’s absolutely fearless.”

Mean Girls opens on Friday See the trailer for Mean Girls on June’s The Month CD-Rom

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