New career, new home, new outlook: Lily Allen tells Stylist’s Helen Bownass how she’s flourishing in every way
PHOTOGRAPHY: TOM VAN SCHELVEN FASHION: LUCY REBER INTERIORS: REBECCA DE BOEHMLER
The last time I interviewed Lily Allen was four years and four days ago. She was guest editing an issue of Stylist, and I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn to say she wasn’t in her happiest place. It was just a few months after the release of her memoir, My Thoughts Exactly, which details, with extreme candour, her life growing up in the glare of the tabloids, her struggles with drink and drug addiction, her mental health battles and the breakdown of her first marriage. It felt like she was trying to rebuild herself and work out what should come next.
Fast forward 1,464 days, and while all our worlds have shifted in ways we could never have dreamt of in the heady days of April 2019, Allen has been through a dramatic what’s next. She’s been sober from drugs and alcohol since July 2019, met and married Stranger Things actor David Harbour, moved her two daughters to New York and broke the internet when they revealed the gorgeous Brooklyn townhouse that she and Harbour renovated in cult interiors magazine Architectural Digest.
She’s recently been diagnosed with ADHD, saying, “It sort of runs in my family. And it’s only [been diagnosed] because I’m here in America where they take these things slightly more seriously than they do in England,” and has also sidestepped into a new facet of her career with excellent reviews for her role in 2:22 A Ghost Story and her first TV series, Sky comedy-drama Dreamland. Next up is an even bigger career challenge: starring in West End play The Pillowman.
The award-winning play, written by The Banshees Of Inisherin and In Bruges director Martin McDonagh, is about a totalitarian state in which a writer is questioned by the authorities about a spate of murders that bear similarities to her own short stories. Allen doesn’t underestimate it, admitting she feels sick with nerves, but there’s also an excited glint in her eye about the prospect of stepping out of the box she’s been put in since she first shot to fame all those years ago.
It seems like your life has changed since I last saw you. Does it feel the same to you?
Yes and no. I still occupy my body and navigate the world in a similar way. So it feels like my life. But I live somewhere else, and I’m married – had I even met David when I last saw you?
No, you were…
Really depressed! I wasn’t in a great place. Life feels pretty fantastic at the moment. Sobriety is the big thing that has changed things for the better. In
