More than a decade after Lindsay Lohan’s widely mocked turn as Elizabeth Taylor in Lifetime’s “Liz and Dick,” the 2012 television film is being revisited as a case study in how the entertainment industry, the tabloid press, and one producer’s publicity instincts converged to turn a troubled young actress into a spectacle rather than a comeback story.
The film, which chronicled the tempestuous romance between Taylor and Richard Burton from their first meeting on the set of “Cleopatra” through Burton’s death in 1984, premiered on Lifetime to 3. 5 million viewers — a respectable number, but far short of the 6. 5 million who tuned in for the network’s “Steel Magnolias” remake a month earlier.
Critics were merciless, and the movie quickly became fodder for listicles cataloging its most unintentionally hilarious moments.
Yet the story behind the film is arguably more dramatic than anything that made it to air. Producer Larry A. Thompson, whose resume was built on made-for-TV biopics about famous couples including Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, conceived the project shortly after Taylor’s death in March 2011.
He approached Megan Fox, Olivia Wilde, Kate Beckinsale, and Jennifer Connelly before the role went to Lohan, who was then deep in a years-long battle with the legal system, addiction, and a press corps that treated her every misstep as entertainment.
Between 2007 and the spring of 2012, Lohan attended five rehab facilities, appeared in court 20 times, was found to have violated her probation four times, and was sentenced to six months in jail — though she served less than two weeks behind bars collectively due to overcrowding measures. She was also charged with felony grand theft in 2011 over an alleged $2,500 necklace theft. By the time her casting was announced, she had become, in the public imagination, less an actress than a cautionary tale.
Thompson, however, framed the casting as an act of artistic intuition. He told Out magazine that Lohan “could relate to Elizabeth Taylor,” citing their shared experiences as highly successful child actors, their scrutinized romantic relationships, and their fraught relationships with the press. “We felt that with the combination of her acting talent with her personal experiences similar to Elizabeth Taylor, she could bring a level of maturity and understanding to the role that maybe others might not,” he said.
But the marketing told a different story. Promotional teasers paired Lohan with words like “provocative” and “controversial.” Thompson’s interviews with major outlets including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and CNN painted a portrait of a production teetering on chaos.
He described purchasing incarceration insurance for Lohan, worrying about her probation requirements, and told CNN that making a movie with her was “like jumping out of an airplane at 10,000 feet with a bolt of white nylon, a string, and a sewing machine. You’re building a parachute as fast as you can.”
Critics saw through the strategy immediately. Hermione Hoby wrote in The Guardian that “the fascination surrounding Liz and Dick has little to do with any hope of a great performance,” calling it “the first movie to be explicitly marketed around the disastrous life of its own star.” Richard Lawson, writing in The Atlantic, was blunter: “We all know why Lohan was cast.
She’s here as a stunt.” Moren Ryan of The Huffington Post said “exploitation really is the name of the game here.”
Sheila Marikar of ABC News summarized the dynamic with uncomfortable precision: “Let’s be real. You’re not going to watch Liz and Dick because you want to know about the love story of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. If you tune in to this mess of a movie, it will be because you want to see how bad Lindsay Lohan is in her supposed comeback.”
Set reports only fueled the narrative. In June 2012, Lohan was involved in a car accident on the way to set and was hospitalized as a precaution. Later that month, producers summoned medics to treat her for exhaustion after an all-night shoot.
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees began monitoring working conditions on the production. Each development was meticulously reported, feeding a cycle that seemed designed to confirm the worst assumptions about the actress.
What emerged on screen did little to silence the skeptics. The film employed a strange framing device in which Taylor and Burton narrate their story from a black-box theatrical void — a conceit that collapses entirely after Burton’s death. The costume design replicated Taylor’s wardrobe with care, but almost no effort was made to age Lohan across the decades the story spans, undermining her believability as a middle-aged woman.
Reviews called out the cheap production design and the film’s tendency to render one of Hollywood’s most chaotic and operatic romances as a small, safe melodrama.
Karina Longworth, writing for Slate, noted that the real Burton and Taylor “weren’t real people. They lived like something between gods and space aliens, as though the rules that govern mere mortals simply did not apply to them.” The film, she argued, failed to capture any of that grandeur.
As portrayed in “Liz and Dick,” the couple was “not nearly drunk enough, horny enough, haunted, jubilant, or witty enough to evoke the real thing.”
Lohan’s performance drew particular scrutiny. Critics noted a modern tenor to her line readings that clashed with mid-century speech patterns, and many observed that she seemed far less comfortable playing a mature adult than she had as a child star. Willa Paskin wrote in Salon that “child actors can get away with a cutesy directness, a workmanlike stagey quality that comes across as phony in adult actors.
In child actors, effort can make up for a lack of believability. Trying hard counts when you’re a kid, but Lohan has never been able to quite erase this fakery from her adult performances.”
New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum offered a more forgiving assessment, tweeting during the broadcast that “somewhere there is a pie chart of who’s at fault for the badness of this movie. Lohan’s only 10%.” That figure, low as it was, reflected a broader recognition that the film’s failures were structural — the script, the direction, the production values, and the cynical machinery behind it all.
Lohan herself had pursued the role with genuine passion. She told interviewers she had obtained Thompson’s number and “started harassing” him directly, bypassing her agents because she was determined to play Taylor. “No one else is going to play this role.
I have to do this,” she said. “I’m really honored, and I will not let anyone down, especially myself.” She spoke about wanting the public to know her for her work rather than her personal life, and about learning to love herself and take the time she needed to be happy.
But the press had little interest in those aspirations. In the few interviews she consented to do, no one asked how she prepared to embody Taylor. Questions focused on her personal life, her legal troubles, and her reputation.
Barbara Walters had arranged an exclusive sit-down and even visited the set, but Lohan changed publicity teams and declined to continue, choosing instead to appear on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” where she faced softer questions about jello commercials and 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 tabloid covers.
The film’s premiere was followed days later by Lohan’s arrest for allegedly hitting someone in a nightclub — a development that seemed to confirm every cynical prediction. The following year, the BBC released its own biopic, “Burton and Taylor,” starring Helena Bonham Carter, which focused on the couple’s final performances together in the play “Private Lives” in 1983. NPR’s David Bianculli called it “much more satisfying than watching a boring by-the-numbers recreation of career highlights like last year’s horrible Lifetime movie Liz and Dick.”
Thompson’s gamble, meanwhile, barely paid off financially, and his later political ambitions fared no better. He ran for Congress in Los Angeles, declaring that the district “used to be Reagan country” and that he was running “to take it back” — he lost 66% to 33%.
In the years since, Lohan has found a genuine career resurgence through a series of romantic comedies for Netflix and the upcoming “Freakier Friday,” a sequel to her 2003 hit. The reception to those projects has been warm, suggesting that the actress who once seemed trapped by her past may finally be writing a different story.
But the legacy of “Liz and Dick” endures as a cautionary tale about an industry that profits from public breakdowns, a press that treats humiliation as sport, and a culture that logs on gleefully to craft the perfect zinger at a young woman’s expense. As one retrospective assessment put it, the whole 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 was “a horribly unfortunate situation from almost every angle” — a film that exploited its star, a star who wasn’t ready, and a system that rewarded cruelty with clicks.
Even Lady Gaga weighed in at the time, tweeting in defense of Lohan: “Lindsay Lohan, you did a beautiful job on Liz and Dick. Let no one bring you down. Liz didn’t.
They always try to knock the greats down a few pegs.” It was a rare note of grace in a conversation that had precious little of it.
