LILY COLLINS

Starlet gets serious…

Ijust wrote a book [Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me],” starts Lily Collins. “[In which] I talk about a lot of taboo things a lot of young girls go through, but don’t like to admit: eating disorders; relationships with significant others, parents and yourself; and your insecurities growing up. It’s basically like having a diary published, I talk about sensitive topics. But the second that I did, I realised that I was not alone.”

Collins is in Cannes promoting Bong Joon-ho’s political-satiremasquerading-as-a-family- mo vie Okja, in which she plays an Animal Liberation Front activist fighting to rescue the eponymous super-pig from being served as a sandwich. It seems that her character’s blazing spirit is a part of her, too, for she today talks of things personal and painful with impressive defiance.

“I thought, ‘I’m 28, I want a family one day, and I don’t want these things

to continue to hold me back,’” she says. “I wanted to let go of a lot.”

The daughter of Phil Collins and Jill Tavelman, who was president of the Beverly Hills Women’s Club for three years, Lily has been acting since she was two. She shot to fame playing Snow White in 2012’s Mirror Mirror, and has since starred in The Mortal Instruments: City Of Bones, romcom Love, Rosie and Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply. Okja marks a move into more (ahem) meaty material, and next up is To The Bone, about a young woman dealing with anorexia.

“I wrote my chapter [in Unfiltered] on my experience with eating disorders a week before I got that script,” she recalls. “It was like the universe throwing it at me, saying, ‘This is something you need to bring to more people, or finish dealing with yourself.’ The film helped me dig deeper in the writing. It’s been really interesting to have a lot of young women come up to me and tell their stories. It felt revolutionary because it was OK to talk about all of a sudden.”

ETA | 14 JULY / TO THE BONE STREAMS ON NETFLIX NEXT MONTH. OKJA AND UNFILTERED: NO SHAME, NO REGRETS, JUST ME, ARE OUT NOW.