Lily Allen has done it all, from No.1 singles to selling sex toys. But at every turn, she’s been faced with painful media scrutiny. Now, as we honour her with Theatre Actor at the GLAMOUR Women of the Year Awards 2023, Lily proves her doubters wrong yet again. Lily talks to Josh Smith about everything from sobriety to Russell Brand – and returning to the studio to make new music.
I am midway through my 90-minute DMC with Lily Allen when I ask, looking back on nearly two decades in the spotlight, what has been her biggest moment of personal growth? Her response? “The GLAMOUR Women of the Year Awards,” Lily replies instantly, via Zoom from her walk-in wardrobe in New York. “I think it was 2008. I was carried out of the GLAMOUR Awards over some railings in an incredibly inebriated state. So, this is my growth. I’m coming back this year, sober.”
I didn’t anticipate the GLAMOUR Women of the Year Awards being such a turning point in Lily’s life, but as I learn throughout our time chatting, you never know what to expect next speaking with Lily. And that’s why she’s been so famous for so long: she’s refreshing in ways you never expect.
“But,” she concedes, “I wouldn’t change anything that happened. I’ve learned from everything and also, I had a lot of fun. But if you’d have said to me at the GLAMOUR Women of the Year Awards in 2008, when I was being carried out by security, that I’d be back in 14 years and I’d be married to an American actor, I’d be sober, my kids would be at school in New York and I’d be doing theatre, I’d be like, ‘What are you talking about? Of course, that’s not going to happen!’ But here I am. I have turned it around, and it feels pretty good.”
Now aged 38, life is certainly very different for Lily. For the past four years, she has swapped drugs and drinking for sobriety and traded constant media scrutiny in London for anonymity in New York where she lives with her two children, Ethel and Marnie (from her previous marriage to builder and decorator Sam Cooper), and her husband, Stranger Things star David Harbour, who she married in 2020 in a low-key Las Vegas wedding.
“Sometimes, I just look up and I’m like, ‘F*ck, there’s the Empire State Building. What am I doing here?’” Lily reflects, adjusting her recently cropped pink hair. “There is a normality to life here that I really enjoy and that my kids really enjoy. I was very nervous about them going through their teenage years with things being so fraught politically in England as they are, because I wouldn’t be able to not have an opinion. Obviously, when I broadcast my opinion, it invites a lot of response, and I don’t really want my kids to have to be on the receiving end of that stuff. I feel safer here. Not that things aren’t bad politically here – they are. I just don’t care as much.”
One of the greatest revelations from this new chapter in Lily’s life has been a shock to her. “I’ve learned I am a morning person,” she smiles. “Now that I have stopped drinking, I get up at 6AM. Never in a million years did I think that would be me, but it wasn’t that I wasn’t a morning person, it was just that I was a drunk.”
Sobriety has also given her a new perspective on her old life. “I certainly look at things that I’ve done and I go, ‘God, that’s cringe,’ or, ‘I wish I hadn’t behaved like that on that night.’ But it’s not really about singular events, it’s more about how it made me feel in general about myself. Sometimes, I look back and I see pictures of myself in a certain period of time and I’ll think, ‘God, I remember looking at the mirror at that time, thinking I looked completely different, and I clearly looked ill, sad and unhealthy.’ You couldn’t have told me that I was those things at that time because I was just numbing it all. I was just numbing the pain. I look back at it sometimes with sadness for that person, but that soon changes into gratitude for what I have now. Thankfully, I found a different way.”
For all the different chapters in her career: the Brit Award-winning musician who produced such mega-hits as Smile, LDN and The Fear, to Somewhere Only We Know, covering Keane’s hit for the John Lewis Christmas ad; host of her own chat show, Lily Allen And Friends, in 2008; the late-noughties face of Chanel; author of Sunday Times’ bestselling autobiography, My Thoughts Exactly, in 2018; and sex-toy tycoon with her range for Womanizer – it’s her latest on-stage career change that has surprised her most. Lily can’t quite believe she is officially an award-winning actor. Nominated for an Olivier Award for her 2021 West End debut in 2:22 A Ghost Story, in which she played a new mother haunted by a ghost, she has now picked up a GLAMOUR Women of the Year Award for Theatre Actor for her role in this year’s The Pillowman, where she starred as Katurian, a writer who is questioned by police about a number of child murders that seem all too similar to her stories. It was also the first time this role was played by a woman on the West End. Lily made her TV acting debut this year, too, in Dreamland, a Sky TV show based on Sharon Horgan’s short about the trials and tribulations of four sisters in Margate.
“I was convinced it would be a disaster,” Lily says, speaking of her pivot into acting. “I’m sort of a bit of a masochist really. When I took on my first role in 2:22 A Ghost Story, I knew it was going to be a learning experience, but I was convinced that the reaction to it was going to be very negative.”
As for Lily being nominated for her first Olivier Award, Lily’s mum – Oscar-nominated producer Alison Owen – was grounding to say the least. “I called my mum and she was like, ‘Are you sure?’” You can always rely on a parent for a grounding moment, can’t you? “She came to see The Pillowman, and she was quite taken aback. She came backstage afterwards and I said, ‘Did you enjoy it?’ And she said, ‘God, no. If you weren’t in it, I would’ve left at the interval.’ She’s very, very honest. A little too honest sometimes.”
While Lily’s mother was a tough audience, The Pillowman was a huge box-office success with critics calling her “commanding” performance “near-perfection”. Lily herself is now no longer listening to any reviews. “I do read reviews, but after this play [The Pillowman], I will never read reviews ever again, because there were some that were less than complimentary about me and my performance – and it killed me for a few days, but I did learn a lot from it. Although people have been very critical in the press about me – my personality, my appearance or the decisions that I’ve made in my life – generally in terms of my creative output, I’ve never really had any reaction critically other than, ‘She’s brilliant.’ This was the first time that that hadn’t happened. And actually, it wasn’t the criticism that upset me, it was the fact that I had to talk to people about it.”
“My mum called me and said, ‘How do you feel?’ And I was like, ‘Oh God, I can’t believe I have to have this conversation.’ I realised that I’ve spent nearly 20 years hiding behind my success a little bit, because as long as, ‘Lily’s doing fine, she’s in the charts and her albums are doing well,’ I can just bat people away. This time was different and it made me very uncomfortable, but it was really valuable in lots of ways.”
She continues, “Not only did I have a couple of classes with some acting coaches that helped me find some other stuff for the play, but it was more of a wake-up call in terms of what I’ve used my success for in the past. Even though it’s a very public-facing job, I’ve been able to hide in it, in lots of ways. Reading my bad reviews meant that I actually had to go and talk to people about it. It’s like, ‘Thank you for my bad review.’”
Lily is certainly feeling the fear and doing it anyway in this new chapter. “When you go into the theatre and go up for the first time, it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before, nerve-wise. It’s absolutely horrendous,” she discloses. “In the few days leading up to those first shows, you’re like, ‘What the f*ck have I done? Why am I doing this to myself? Why on earth would I have thought this is a good idea?’ It’s a bit like having children. When you are in the delivery suite, you’re pushing it out, you’re like, ‘What the f*ck made me think this was a good idea?’ But then the child comes at the end and you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s quite sweet.’ And then you might even do it again.”
Lily delivered on stage in The Pillowman and delivered at the stage door afterwards, too, wearing one show-stopping look after another, which became an internet sensation in the process. But these looks were actually a result of being hounded by the paparazzi (Lily’s famously fraught relationship with the paparazzi came to a head in 2009 when she obtained a legal injunction to protect her from harassment by two agencies.)
“Because of a certain scene [no spoilers here], I’d have to jump in the shower afterwards. I was leaving the show with a baseball cap on and my drowned rat hair because I didn’t have time to blowdry it. The paparazzi were there every night and they were getting these pictures of me just looking like a drowned rat. I thought, ‘They’ll get bored of these pictures after a while,’ and they didn’t. They just kept coming. And Kyle De’Volle, my stylist, called me up and was like, ‘Babes, we need to talk. We’re missing a trick. They’re not going away and it would be good if we wore some nice clothes.’
I’m not particularly a fan of getting dressed up every f*cking night,” Lily continues, “but the role got harder and harder – especially in the early days – because it’s just so harrowing, troubling and demanding. I started to realise that, actually, it was a really helpful process to come off stage, get in the shower, come out, and then get into another character, which was this glamorous West End dame. And it was nice to have someone in the dressing room because David was in America, my kids were at summer camp, so I was quite lonely and isolated. It was lovely to have Kyle there. My daughters were so confused, they’re like, ‘Where are you going?’ I was like, ‘To the car.’”
It turns out the way to overcome the anxiety of dining on your own is to do it in style. “Afterwards, I’d quite often go to this restaurant called Barrafina and it was like something out of an old movie,” she continues. “I’d get out of my chauffeur-driven car in this long ballgown, sit at the bar on my own and order myself some olives. And they’re like, ‘Oh, he’s not showing up?’ And I’m like, ‘I may look like I am here for a date, but I am here for my burger and chips.’”
Lily has always thrived in her own company, though. “I love being on my own,” she reveals. “In the summertime, my kids go on holiday with their dad because we’re here [in New York] for most of the year. My favourite thing if David’s working is I just fly off to Italy, rent a car and I don’t even book a hotel. I just drive around on my own with a book, blanket, a couple of pairs of shorts, a few T-shirts and that’s it. It’s the best.”
Aside from filming her own personal sequel to Eat, Pray, Love after her huge theatre box office success, might a musical be on her horizon? After singing Oliver! songs and The Little Mermaid to warm up backstage, Lily is not ruling it out. “I’d quite like to have a pop at, like, Evita maybe, but I’m a bit old for Evita now. I get sick of the sound of my own songs when I’m on tour, so I’d have to really like the music in order to commit to something like that. It would have to be a f*cking moment like Evita. I would only do it if I get to do big costumes.”
The big costumes will have to wait, though, as Lily has now enrolled in a year-long acting conservatory course in New York, which is the first time she has entered a school since she left at 15. “It’s really teaching me a lot about myself,” she admits. “It’s very uncomfortable at times. I’m doing scene study at the moment with a 22-year-old boy named Ben who’s lovely, and I’m playing his mum, which is great. He is playing a 17-year-old and I’m playing a 37-year-old, and I’m only a year older than that. So, I really am a mum now.”
Up until now, Lily has lived a life littered with experiences that many people couldn’t even imagine living through, from having her every move tracked by tabloids to a barrage of sexist articles written about her on an almost daily basis at one time. I wonder if there is a moment of sexism that really shocks her, looking back.
“When the phone hacking scandal happened, I went up against two different publications and my lawyers came because we had to go through all of the articles,” she tells me. “They turned up on both occasions, the two different publications that I went head-to-head with, and they had box files of all of the articles that had ever been written about me by those publications. I’m not exaggerating, there were just seven or eight files for each different one. I was reading through them from 2005 onwards and I did think, ‘How are you alive? How can one person withstand so much abuse, really?’ When they’re happening singularly, it just seems like it’s all in a day’s work, but I think those moments were probably when it hit me the hardest and I thought, ‘I bet you there aren’t that many men that have got files this big.’”
How did that 15-year period of extreme intrusion make her feel? “It felt pretty isolating. It’s one of those things that people project their own ideas to what it must be like. And still to this day, there’s a lot of, ‘Well, you knew what you were getting into.’ And actually, I didn’t. I went up to Manchester, I wrote some songs, I put them up on MySpace, and a year later, I had 25 men with long-lens cameras on my doorstep all day, every day. I didn’t go after that kind of attention; it came to me. Once it was there, it was sort of inescapable. Listen, there were upsides to it – I was making a lot of money and I was getting to travel the world – but it’s a little bit like when a girl or a woman suffers sexual assault and tries to report it and someone says, ‘Well, what were you wearing?’ It’s a little bit like that: ‘Well, you play the game, too.’ And it’s like, ‘Do I play the game? I don’t know if I do. I just want to write music.’
In retrospect, I’ve sort of resented it slightly, because I really wanted to be taken seriously as an artist and it undercut that. It turned me into a little bit of a cartoon character and that was not something that I really enjoyed. Sadly, the way that I dealt with that was turning to substances and alcohol. It was painful and it was really hard to articulate. Nobody really could understand it unless they were going through it themselves – and women in that industry are pitted against each other, so we don’t really come together and share our experiences. So, we don’t even really have each other to lean on and to share those experiences, and I think that’s done on purpose in some ways.”
Things are certainly changing in the entertainment industry, particularly following anti-harassment movements like Time’s Up. But in light of the recent Russell Brand rape and sexual assault allegations published by The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches last month (Brand denies the allegations), it is clear there is much to be done to finally make the industry a truly safe space for women. As someone who previously, and bravely, revealed that she was the victim of sexual assault at the hands of an unnamed music executive, I ask Lily what needs to be done.
“I’m not a policymaker, so I can’t really come up with a solution,” she responds. “There’s still a lot of work to be done, but to be honest with you, I don’t even really think it’s for people like me or women to come up with a solution, because we have so little power in the game. It’s men. Men need to come around together and decide where the line is, what is acceptable behaviour, what isn’t acceptable behaviour, how they’re going to call each other out when these things happen. Because women can scream and shout until the cows come home – and we have been doing this for hundreds of years and things don’t really seem to change. Maybe let’s stop asking women and let’s ask men what they think should be done.”
In the battle for women’s safety, a lack of male allyship is a continuing problem, as is the desire to disprove or not believe victims. “I don’t even think that men know what they’ve done wrong,” Lily continues, “because Russell Brand had allegedly been doing what he’s doing, but on one hand is being awarded ‘Shagger of the Year’ [by The Sun newspaper]. I feel like, again, ‘How are you to know that what you are doing is wrong, if nobody in the room is telling you that what you’re doing is wrong?’ And men surround themselves with men primarily. A man can say, ‘This happened last night,’ and his mates will go, ‘That’s fine, mate. That’s cool, whatever.’ If you went into a room full of women and said the same thing, they’d go, ‘Hang on. No, that’s not right.’ But men don’t often go into a room with women and ask their opinions on things; they ask their peers. So, women can come up with solutions, but it’s not until men consider them and discuss them among themselves that we can make any progress.”
Lily has continuously used her voice on everything from campaigning for the families of Grenfell Tower to sharing her ADHD diagnosis to help others. Through her music, she talked about everything from blowjobs to menstruation which were, and still are, game-changing topics for female musicians to cover. Out of everything she has achieved, is this what she is proudest of? “I still get messages from people on Instagram – and even people coming up to me outside the theatre with actual tears in their eyes, saying what a profound effect I have had on their lives and their own journeys. I never really went out to do that, but that has happened, and it is…” She pauses. “Sorry, I’m getting a bit weepy thinking about it.”
“It’s really profound,” Lily resumes. “It’s really amazing because there are moments in my life where I feel so worthless, and so isolated, and such a failure, and then complete strangers come up to me with tears in their eyes.”
Given the impact she has had on others, I ask why has Lily ever felt worthless? “Because people have constantly told me that,” she responds. “I don’t do it any more, but I’d put my name into Twitter and search it, and there would be hundreds of comments telling you exactly that. Sometimes it’s hard to not let those voices come in. I have the kind of personality where 100 people can tell me positive stuff, and two people will tell me something negative, and it’s the two negative things that stay with me. I’ve carried the weight of that in the past. I try not to let it seep in any more, but it depends how I’m feeling. Sometimes it sits and lands, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
Will she ever go back to music? Fellow Lily Allen fans *truly* brace yourselves for this… “Yes, I will,” she declares. “I had a conversation with the record company that I have a distribution deal with yesterday about doing some sessions before Christmas. I’m not saying that I’m working on an album, because I’m definitely not, but I’m getting back into the idea of trying to find a space where some music will reveal itself.
It has to feel worthy,” Lily goes on. “It has to feel like I’m doing something. I have to be processing something or talking. It has to be provocative in some way, because what’s the point otherwise? I’m not here to make money and get streams. I’m here to provoke thought and to try and make sense of the world – not just for myself, but for the people that have bought into my product over the past 20 years.”
Performing her hit F*ck You alongside Olivia Rodrigo at Glastonbury in 2022 (Olivia was five when the song came out) and dedicating it to the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v Wade was a reawakening for Lily Allen: The Popstar. “It was a really powerful moment and it was fun,” she says. “I hadn’t been on the stage like that for a long time and to play to a big crowd like that, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is fun. I’m quite good at this. I should do some more of this.’”
One thing Lily won’t be doing if or when she returns to music is TikTok dances. “I find it hard to navigate the world of music as it is now. You are not going to get me on TikTok doing dances. It’s not who I am. Bands like Pulp or Oasis wouldn’t have been successful in today’s world because you wouldn’t get Noel Gallagher or Liam Gallagher doing those things. Or, do you think Jarvis Cocker would be doing TikTok dances? No! We just live in a different time.”
In light of us talking about a potential return to Lily Allen: The Popstar, I wonder if fame has been another addiction. “Absolutely,” she agrees. “It’s all the same thing. It’s escaping yourself in lots of ways. And when the cameras stop showing up or the handbags stop coming through the post and the flowers stop arriving, you are suddenly just a person in a room without all this stuff. So, yeah, that becomes addictive for sure.”
Would she let either of her daughters pursue a career that brings them fame, after everything she has been through? “I’ve had a lot of fun. The only reason I would say no is because I’d be jealous,” Lily jokes. “If my daughter was suddenly getting picked up in a Mercedes S-Class and being driven off to a Chanel event, I’d be like, ‘Hmm, OK.’”
Luckily the fashion week invites are still coming, so Lily won’t have to trade her Mercedes for an Uber Toyota Prius any time soon. One thing that is a continuing journey for her, though, is working out who the real Lily Allen is away from her celebrity status. “I’m still learning now. I don’t know if I’ll ever learn,” she says.
“Therapy, lots of therapy,” has helped her up until this point and Lily has always been very honest about her mental health journey, admitting she has turned to medication, too, for help. “I’ve always maintained the idea that if you brush something under the carpet then it stays under the carpet, it festers and it gets worse and worse,” she says. “No problems have ever been solved by ignoring them; I’ve always thought that talking about things is the best way. Unfortunately, most of the talking I did in my youth was with journalists or the internet, so I did things in a very public way. I felt like it was my calling at the time to talk about things that people didn’t necessarily talk about.”
After doing so much work on herself, does Lily have love for herself now? “Yeah, I do,” she replies. “And not in this sort of Instagram sense. People love to wang on about that a lot and there’s a certain amount of bullsh*t that comes with that self-love conversation. I’ve found an amount of self-love – or at least peace – but it’s not my mantra. Quite a lot of those infographic Instagram self-love posts are about self-interest and doing whatever it is you want to do, and not giving a sh*t about anybody else that’s getting in your way. I really do not subscribe to that. It’s a very Tory way of thinking: ‘It doesn’t matter, you do what you need to do, and make sure that number one’s OK’. I don’t believe in that. I believe in the idea of community and that if you look after everybody around you, then those people will hold you up. At least, that’s been my experience.”
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