I Work Just as Hard as Scarlett, Whines Job-Needing Lindsay

Lindsay Lohan is supposedly still on the wagon, but that hasn't stopped her from uncorking a mighty fine whine.
"You know what's hard?" the underemployed, drama-addicted starlet, 22, bellyaches in the February issue of Interview (the chat was conducted by Lauren Hutton). "I want to give back. I want to do all the things that will make me feel fulfilled. But whenever I do those things, people think it's a press stunt or something."
Lohan, who reportedly rang in the new year by publicly brawling with squeeze Samantha Ronson, blames the paparazzi for making her life difficult, insisting that "there's really no way of hiding from that," even though actual do-gooders such as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are able to disappear -- with six kids in tow -- for extended periods of time.
When Hutton suggests that she go somewhere "where no one knows you," Lindsay sighs that "it's so impossible for me to actually do that," citing as evidence her November trip to Dubai for a swanky hotel opening, a star-packed soiree that drew everyone from Mary-Kate Olsen to Robert De Niro, not exactly the place to get away from it all.
"But the second that you complain about it, they say, 'Well, this is what you wanted, so this is what you're going to get.' That's all people see it as now. It's not, 'No, I just want to have some time for myself,'" she grouses, seemingly oblivious to her complete inability to stay away from the spotlight and enjoy a quiet night at home with a cup of cocoa and a good book. "There are things I want to do, and people don't understand that. You know, my car accident that I got into where I got my first charge, I wouldn't have been speeding up like I was if I didn't have people shoving cameras in my windows."
Lindsay appears to be referring to her May 2007 arrest for DUI after she curbed her Mercedes ("my favorite car," she points out, "which I worked my ass off to buy for myself") in Beverly Hills after a night on the town. Soon after, she entered rehab for the second of three times that year.

Lindsay gets her groove on at a London club last November. (©Retna Ltd.)
"I have become this girl who just loves to be photographed, doesn't know how to focus, doesn't know how to work on set, just loves the attention, knows how to go out at night, knows how to party," she fumes. "And you know what? I was 20 years old. I never went to college. I lived maybe six months out of my life like that, doing something wrong, and then I stopped. God forbid I should have ever learned my lesson. But at this point it's so hard for people to even believe that there was a lesson to be learned at all, because they just think I'm wrong."
And while some might question Lohan's math on that six-months-of-her-life figure (apropos of nothing, she was accused of bad behavior in October while guest-starring on "Ugly Betty," with her planned six episodes getting cut to four), she sighs that she can't shake her tabloid-stoked reputation.
"I just feel as though it's become a situation where people have manifested this caricature of who I am, and they act as if there's no real person inside of it," she gripes (although props for the five-dollar phrase "manifested this caricature"). "I mean, people really have come to believe -- directors, producers, agents, whoever it may be -- that I started in this because I wanted to be a celebrity. But that was never my intention."
What hurts the most, moans the actress, who has spent much of the last several months fighting with Ronson at hot spots around the globe and posting defensive messages on her MySpace page, "is that I work just as hard as any other actress around my age, like Scarlett Johansson, but I just don't get the opportunities that they get because people are so distracted by the mess that I created in my life. But that doesn't mean it's going to last forever."
(By the by, the reference to the Woody Allen-beloved starlet comes three years after Lohan reportedly scrawled a decidedly nasty dig at her in a bathroom stall at a New York bar. "I don't really know that person," Scarlett sniffed in the December issue of Allure. "I don't know what the motivation was.")
Lindsay also name-drops Heath Ledger in the chat, recalling some words of wisdom he gave her on fame: "He said, 'It's build you up to knock you down, and that's all it is. And you just have to see if you can stand through it.' And it is like that, if you put yourself in this situation. I was young, so maybe I did ... I always wanted to take the blame. I've always been apologetic for other people's faults."
She continues, "And I didn't even try everything. I was too afraid. The one thing I tried was the wrong thing. And maybe it was just because I'd seen someone else in my family do it -- not my mother. But, I don't know, it really ... It sucks."
Perhaps with all the free time she's had on her hands lately, Lohan should consider enrolling in a few film study classes, if only to mix with a more cinematically erudite crowd.

"I wanted to be a movie star. But movie stars are not what they used to be ... I don't think there are too many films coming out these days that we're going to look at in the future and say, 'This is one of the great ones,'" explains the star of such turkeys as "I Know Who Killed Me" and "Just My Luck." "Like, what is the great film that I will tell my children about? I'm still going to tell them about the old films, the Hitchcock films. And people my age don't even know who those people are. I can't even have a conversation with most people of my generation about that, because they'd be like, 'OK, she's a freak. Something's wrong with her.'"
Meanwhile, it seems Lohan was in no mood for a conversation -- about film or anything else -- when she hit Los Angeles hot spot Apple Lounge on Tuesday night with a girlfriend and an assistant but sans Ronson, says E! News.
"She seemed kind of indifferent, emotionless," recalls a spywitness. "It was definitely apparent her friends were trying to cheer her up. It looked to be a 'first night back out on the town' sort of thing."
Lindsay, who took to her blog on Monday to deny breakup reports, was spotted with Sam on Wednesday as they exited the DJ's house, but they ignored shutterbug-lobbed questions about the state of their relationship.
That same day, Lohan took a break from all her hard work to go on a paparazzi-documented shopping trip to Burberry and Barneys in Beverly Hills.