Lindsay and Shailene are liars

Lindsay Lohan and Shailene Woodley are currently shooting the series Count My Lies, based on the book by Sophia Stava. Adding to what Sarah said last week about this series, it's a domestic/nanny psychological thriller, about a compulsive liar (Shailene) who starts caregiving for a couple (Lindsay and Kit Harington) with their own f-cked up secrets.

The show, which will stream on Hulu, belongs in the same category as Jessica Biel’s work in recent years, and The Housemaid which was a recent hit at the box office. Also the upcoming Verity, starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson. Basically women being complicated and messy, with more depth than reality television and housewives, Mormon or otherwise. I’m into the genre, and there are so many books to draw from to keep the train going.

What makes this interesting here where Lindsay is concerned is that after launching her comeback with Hallmark-now-Netflix holiday rom-coms, she’s pivoting to more serious drama. She’s now a mother and she just played a mother for the first time in Freakier Friday, but that was a comedy. Lindsay is turning 40 in July, and aging into more mature roles. She became famous when she was so young, there’s always been a youthfulness associated with her – extended of course by the rom-coms she’s been making for the last several years. So I get the strategy here with this career choice, I’m curious to see what she does with the material, as she leans into a darker performance.

I’m also curious to see how she plays off Shailene Woodley. They’re contemporaries now, just five years apart, but Shailene broke out just as Lindsay’s potential and status in Hollywood was starting to decline after years of personal struggles. Like Lindsay, Shailene started acting when she was young, but became famous just as she was coming out of her teens, a young adult, with The Descendants and The Fault in Our Stars and then carrying the Divergent franchise which, of course, skewed to a younger audience who’d read the books. She’s part of the wave of actors – Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, Brie Larson, Saoirse Ronan – who came up in the wake of the earlier cohort of young female celebrities dominating the internet in the 2000s, of which Lindsay was a prominent member. Not quite a full generation apart but maybe half a generation, enough of a gap to have learned from what they’d just seen happen to their predecessors and make the adjustment. Of course none of those celebrity narratives need or should be part of the story they’re telling here in Count My Lies, but for the gossips who will be watching, me included, it is a little bit part of the intrigue.