Hardcore movie fans love to play the what-if game. What if Robert Zemeckis had kept Eric Stoltz in the part of Marty McFly? What if Molly Ringwald had taken the Vivian Ward role in Pretty Woman? And, of course, what if Lindsay Lohan had been cast in The Avengers?
Oh, you haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about that last question? Well, Lindsay Lohan certainly has. The actress brought it up during the latest episode of her OWN docu-series. She apparently told her manager to look into finding her a part in the mega-blockbuster comic adaptation. He did. She felt really good about getting it, but the role she wanted instead went to "an unknown" because the suit didn’t bother pushing her hard enough.
Here’s a portion of the actual quote…
"Every day I'm not on a film set, I'm wasting my talent because that's what I was born - and live - to do."
So, the natural question here is what role might Lohan have been competing for. We can eliminate Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) right off the top since they’re both famous and pre-date The Avengers. If so, that leaves us with two possibilities. Possibility One: Lohan wanted the Maria Hill part and doesn’t have any familiarity with Cobie Smulders’ work on How I Met Your Mother, her various other film projects or her personal life as SNL star Taran Killiam’s wife. Possibility Two: She really wanted a role that went to an unknown that existed in an earlier draft but was either almost completely cut down or was completely eliminated and Lohan didn’t notice because she never saw the movie.
No doubt most Avengers fans would have done a horrified doubletake if they would have seen Lindsay Lohan in the finished product, but in many ways, the starlet’s long history of sketchy decision-making has caused people to forget that she’s a halfway decent actress when she’s focused and motivated.
See? She holds her own there opposite Lizzy Caplan, who is definitely good enough at acting to be in The Avengers without screwing things up. Therefore, according to the Transitive Property Of Equality, Lohan could have been in The Avengers without screwing things up, if she was on her best behavior and if she turned in a Mean Girls level performance and if, oh screw it. It’s probably better for everyone not named Lindsay Lohan that Lindsay Lohan was not in The Avengers.
Here’s to hoping she redeems herself enough someday that she can appear in headlines like this without a majority of Cinema Blend readers doing a spit take or asking for their pink shirts back.
