A Christmas miracle? How trashy festive movies revived the fortunes of Noughties stars from Lindsay Lohan to Lacey Chabert

We are in the midst of a Lindsay Lohan renaissance – or rather a Lohanaissance – and it is thanks in no small part to Christmas. Alongside Jamie Lee Curtis (and to the joy of millennials everywhere) the actress is set to reprise her role in next year’s sequel to 2003 Disney hit Freaky Friday.

After more than a decade of career instability, legal woes, rehab stints and dodgy accents, Lohan has made a mighty return to late-night talk shows, fashion front rows and magazine covers. Her star seems to be shining as bright as ever.

A defining factor in Lohan’s career revival? Her work with Netflix. The streaming giant gave the 38-year-old – who was one of the early Noughties biggest stars thanks to roles in teen flicks like Mean Girls and Just My Luck – her first lead role in almost a decade.

Released in 2021, the sickly-sweet Christmas romcom Falling for Christmas is just as cheesy as its name suggests, with Lohan playing Sierra, a spoiled heiress who falls in love with the owner of a local inn after suffering from a skiing accident.

Her second Christmas romcom with the streaming service, titled Our Little Secret, came out last week to unsurprisingly mixed reviews. The film – which finds Lohan spending the holidays with both her current and ex-boyfriend, the latter of whom is dating her partner’s sister – debuted as the platform’s most-watched film a day after its release, mirroring the success of Falling for Christmas, which became the most-watched Christmas film released in 2022.

While the storylines are flat and cringe factor is high on this festive fare – which are proving to be the streaming age’s answer to the low-budget tack of the Hallmark Channel – Lohan’s performance on her return to viewers’ screens has frequently been praised.

But she’s not alone: her success seems to be inspiring her 2000s contemporaries to follow suit. Lacey Chabert, who appeared alongside Lohan in Mean Girls, recently starred in the platform’s Hot Frosty, where she plays a widow who falls in love with a chiselled snowman-turned-human being (yep).

One Tree Hill heartthrob Chad Michael Murray – who played Lohan’s romantic interest in Freaky Friday – has made a return to public consciousness with two Netflix-made films this year, appearing alongside Brooke Shields in panned romcom Mother of the Bride and Christmas cheesefest The Merry Gentleman.

These films are designed for one thing: the kind of easy, mindless entertainment you need in the background while you complete another, more pressing activity, like wrapping presents or filing your nails.

They’re trashy, often comically so (the overacting of an extra in Hot Frosty recently went viral on TikTok), but even in an age where we can watch anything, anytime, anywhere – a critically lauded series, an Oscar-winning feature film – there’s clearly an appetite remaining for them.

This year’s festive period tells us two things: one is that even though our viewing habits have shifted to streaming, our love of trashy Christmas films will always prevail. Secondly, for actors who may not have felt their star shine bright for a while, the teen-flick-to-Christmas-romcom pipeline is certainly a viable career move.

In Lohan’s case, Our Little Secret is the last film she’s contracted to make with Netflix as part of a deal she signed with them in 2022, so it’ll be interesting to see whether the films – and her increased popularity because of them – act as a stepping stone onto bigger projects.