Janeen Damian’s fantasy romantic comedy sends a New York book editor to her best friend’s wedding in Ireland, where one careless wish on an ancient stone makes her the bride, in the second film of Lindsay Lohan‘s Netflix comeback.

Irish Wish begins with a love story told to the wrong person. Maddie Kelly (Lindsay Lohan) is a book editor in New York who has spent a year on the manuscripts of Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos), an author whose plots and prose she has quietly improved, and somewhere along the way she has fallen for him. She has admitted it to her mother but not to her two best friends. Before she can tell Paul, he meets one of those friends, Emma, and the two are drawn to each other almost at once.

A wedding in Ireland and a wish on a stone

Three months later, Maddie flies to Ireland as a bridesmaid at Paul and Emma’s wedding, to be held at the Kennedy family home. The trip starts with a mix-up at baggage reclaim: Maddie argues with an Englishman, James Thomas (Ed Speleers), over a suitcase identical to her own, sends the rest of the party ahead while she deals with the lost luggage office and ends up on a bus with him. James is a wildlife photographer, and that first round of bickering is the thread the story keeps pulling on.

The turn comes at a lake. While the others take out the rowboats, Maddie, feeling like a fifth wheel, wanders off, finds an old wishing seat and says aloud that she wishes Paul were marrying her. A fairy appears, a strong wind rises and Maddie wakes up as the bride-to-be. Everyone around her accepts the new version of events, and James, who crosses her path again, no longer remembers meeting her. From there the plot follows the consequences of the wish: a bike ride she cannot manage, an heirloom wedding dress she is expected to wear instead of her own, and a wedding photographer who quits and is replaced by James.

The screenplay does not leave the source of the magic vague. The fairy turns out to be Saint Brigid, one of the patron saints of Ireland, played by Dawn Bradfield, and a priest tells Maddie that the saint is mischievous: she does not give people what they want, but what they need. That idea carries the whole design of the story. The romance matters, but the question underneath it is whether Maddie will keep improving other people’s work without her name on it.

The middle film of Lindsay Lohan’s Netflix run

Irish Wish is the second film of the partnership Netflix announced with Lindsay Lohan in March 2022, after Falling for Christmas had brought her back that November to a major production for the first time in more than a decade. Netflix presented the project and its premise on 1 September 2022 and reunited her with the director of that Christmas film, Janeen Damian. A third film under the same deal, Our Little Secret, followed later in 2024, and in 2025 Lohan returned to cinemas with Freakier Friday, the sequel to one of her early hits.

The genre is home ground for her. The Parent Trap (1998), Freaky Friday (2003), Mean Girls (2004) and the romantic comedy Just My Luck (2006), another story about a woman whose fortunes are rearranged by forces beyond her control, built the career these Netflix films set out to revisit. Around the deal, Lohan said she missed romantic comedies, which had been her strength when she started acting, and wanted to bring them back with a light, cheerful focus on women discovering themselves. She has described Maddie as a bookworm, a nerd and a slightly naive sweetheart whose head is always in her work, and said she related to the character’s path toward independence. The shoot was also her first trip to Ireland, where her grandfather came from, and her brother Dakota Lohan has a small role as Finn.

From an Italian wedding to an Irish one

The screenplay is by Kirsten Hansen, who has said the story was first set in Italy under the working title European Wedding. She delivered her first draft to the producer Brad Krevoy in January 2020 and it reached Netflix later that year. Somewhere between that draft and the shoot, the wedding moved to Ireland, and with it came the local folklore that now drives the plot: the wishing seat, the saint and the old stone. Hansen also served as an executive producer, alongside Amanda Phillips, Jimmy Townsend and Vince Balzano.

Janeen Damian directs her second feature after her debut with Falling for Christmas. She often works with her husband, Michael Damian, the actor and singer known for playing Danny Romalotti on The Young and the Restless and for his 1989 number-one cover of Rock On; the couple co-wrote the comedy Hot Tamale, his first feature as a director, and the 2016 drama High Strung. Michael Damian produced Irish Wish through his company Riviera Films together with Brad Krevoy of the Motion Picture Corporation of America, the producer behind Dumb and Dumber and the Netflix franchises A Christmas Prince and The Princess Switch. The team has turned glossy, seasonal romance into a reliable line for the platform, and Irish Wish follows the same model. Its makers described it as a be-careful-what-you-wish-for story, in which you may not get what you want but you get what you need, and promised a summer setting, physical comedy and a little magic, with Lohan doing some of her own stunts.

The cast around Lohan

Ed Speleers plays James. The English actor played the title role in Eragon (2006), Jimmy Kent in Downton Abbey and Stephen Bonnet in Outlander, and Netflix approached him for this film as he was finishing the fourth season of You, in which he played Rhys Montrose. Alexander Vlahos, the Welsh actor best known as Philippe, Duke of Orléans, in Versailles and as the adult Mordred in Merlin, plays Paul. Elizabeth Tan, from The Singapore Grip, Top Boy and Emily in Paris, plays Emma Taylor, and Ayesha Curry plays Heather, the third friend. Curry, better known as a cook and businesswoman, returned to acting at the urging of Lohan, a friend of many years.

Jane Seymour plays Rosemary Kelly, Maddie’s mother. Seymour was in Ireland at the time to film her own series, Harry Wild, and shot her entire part in a day and a half at the request of the Damians, who had cast her in High Strung. She and Lohan never filmed a scene together; they met at costume fittings. Jacinta Mulcahy, Matty McCabe and Maurice Byrne play members of the Kennedy family, and several of the supporting actors, among them Jacinta Mulcahy and James Rottger, had worked with the Damians before.

A postcard Ireland, by design

Principal photography ran from 5 September to 14 October 2022 in Dublin, County Wicklow and Westport, in County Mayo. The production filmed at Lough Tay, the Cliffs of Moher, Westport’s town square and Dublin’s Clarence Hotel, while Killruddery House, a historic estate in Wicklow, stood in for the Kennedy home, its lily pond, apple orchard and orangery hosting the garden and wedding scenes. Janeen Damian later joked that the landscape was so green the team had to turn the colour down in post-production, worried that audiences would think it was fake. Graham Robbins was the cinematographer and Scott Hill edited the film, which runs 94 minutes.

Nathan Lanier composed the score, released by Netflix as a soundtrack album on 8 March 2024, a week before the premiere. Its cue titles, from The Wishing Chair to Cliffs of Moher and Back to the Wishing Chair, trace the geography of the story. The trailer was cut to Breathless by the Irish band The Corrs, Michael Damian released a song called Wild Irish Heart ahead of the film, and Lohan’s sister, Aliana Lohan, contributed two original songs, Armor and Comin’ Home.

A Netflix hit with a tourism footprint

Netflix released Irish Wish on 15 March 2024, two days before Saint Patrick‘s Day, after a premiere screening at the Paris Theater in Manhattan on 5 March; a few screenings at the Bay Theater in Los Angeles ran from the same day. The film reached number one on the platform’s film chart the day after release, logged 699 million minutes viewed in its first week according to Luminate data and became the most-streamed title on Netflix worldwide in the week of 18 to 24 March. Ted Sarandos, the company’s co-chief executive, later singled it out for how many viewers watched it to the end. In Ireland, the tourism board noted a rise in online searches for Lough Tay after the release.

Irish Wish is open about its formula: a wedding, the wrong groom, the right stranger and a wish that has to be undone. What lifts it above a travel brochure, on paper at least, is the question under the romance, that of an editor who has spent a year improving someone else’s book and must decide whether she will keep doing it unseen. How much room that idea finds among the lakes, the cliffs and the wedding preparations is for each viewer to judge; for anyone following Lindsay Lohan’s return to the genre that made her famous, it is the middle chapter of a deliberate comeback.