Lily Collins: ‘I’ve never done theatre – I’m terrified’

The Emily in Paris star on making her stage debut alongside Money Heist’s Alvaro Morte

In a small rehearsal room in west London, Lily Collins and Alvaro Morte are recalling the moment they first met. This autumn, the star of one Netflix global hit, Emily in ­Paris, is joining forces with the star of another, Money Heist, for Collins’s stage debut. She turns to Morte: “I think one of the first things I said to you was, ‘OK, I just want to be very honest, I’ve never done this. I’m so excited, but I’m also terrified – in the best way – and I want you to know that there are going to be moments when I’m stressed, I’m anxious, I’m nervous, I’m gonna doubt myself…’”
He nods. Morte is no ­stranger to the stage – the 49-year-old, from Algeciras in southern Spain, has his own theatre company, 300 Pistolas – but Barcelona, a two-hander by the New York playwright Bess Wohl, will also mark his West End debut, in the first play he’s ever performed in English. Even so, ­Collins says, he told her, “I got you, and we’re gonna do this together.” Lynette Linton, the director, encouraged her cast to “over­communicate”; Collins adds, “Like, if you come to work one day feeling a bit insecure and nervous, say it.” And, she is learning, those nerves can be useful. “The story involves anxiety, stress, butterflies, uncertainty, insecurity, excitement – all of those human feelings,” she points out. “So instead of fighting them, lean in, express them.”
Morte and Collins are a physical contrast: he’s calm, bearded, broad-shouldered, all in black; she’s exuberant, pale, delicate, dark hair tucked behind her ears, dressed in a colourful shirt. She’s also feeling a little unwell, she admits – but the show must go on.
In Barcelona, Collins is once again an American abroad, though she has swapped one captivating European city for another. She plays Irene, a US tourist on a hen do, who has taken the first tottering steps towards a messy but passionate one-night stand with a slightly older Spanish man, Manuel (Morte). Like everything else in Wohl’s multi­layered script, their age gap is unlikely to be accidental, suggesting a collision between young, self-centred America and the charm of old Europe. Morte is not that old, of course, and the actors say they haven’t even discussed the 14-year age gap between them. 
Collins brings a deep understanding of her character’s ­emotional backdrop. In Unfiltered – No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me, her bestselling book of essays from 2017, in which she confronted her personal ­struggles with body image and an eating disorder, she also wrote about an emotionally abusive relationship with an ex-partner. “I’ve been able to have empathy and understanding for Irene in ways that we’ve been able to uncover more and more,” she says now. “It’s kind of amazing. I’ve done things before where my life has informed the project,” she adds, presum­ably ­referring to the 2017 film To the Bone, in which she played a young woman dealing with anorexia. While, for ­Barcelona, “I’ve been able to put a lot of my understanding and ­experience into Irene. I feel very close to her in a lot of ways that I don’t know if, at first glance, I could have anticipated.”
The integration of actress and character has been such an important process that the script has been changing almost daily, with Wohl returning to the rehearsal room with reworked scenes each morning. “She’s writing in real time,” ­Collins says. “I’m like, do you have time to sleep?” The script, the actress tells me, is now quite different from the one I had read only days before our interview. “Not completely different, but I think it navigates its way through the ­danger [of being alone with a stranger in an ­unfamiliar place] and their chemistry in a way that feels very raw and very realistic.”
For Morte, until recently, the idea of performing in London was just a dream. Back in 2018, he and his wife, Blanca Clemente, with whom he co-founded 300 Pistolas more than a decade ago, were tourists marvelling at the Victorian splendour of the Duke of York’s Theatre in St Martin’s Lane, where Barcelona opens later this month. “I remember, we were seeing Ian McKellen’s King Lear and just having a drink in the bar at the Duke of York’s,” he recalls. “And I said, ‘Imagine doing some theatre here’ – exactly where we’re going to perform. It feels magical.”
Until he got the opportunity to play the Professor, the Robin Hood-like criminal mastermind in Money Heist, Morte insists, “I was just an average actor in Spain – I was trying to survive.” Originally titled La Casa de Papel, the viscerally exciting drama was conceived as “a limited series with a very limited budget, for national TV. It wasn’t a huge success in Spain. And then Netflix took it and put it in their portfolio, and suddenly it became an explosion all around the world.” He ­remembers how, on the show’s cast and crew WhatsApp group, “We had already forgotten about the [Netflix] release, and then somebody said, ‘Hey, guys, check this out…’” – it was a clip from Argentina, showing a full stadium singing Money Heist’s signature anti-fascist song Bella ciao. 
The success of the show, which continued to snowball over what became a three-season run, altered the trajectory of the actor’s career, leading to roles in Amazon’s big-budget fantasy The Wheel of Time and the horror film Immaculate, opposite Sydney Sweeney.
Collins, meanwhile, once thought of being a broadcast journalist, before she began acting and modelling, and could surely have forged a successful career playing characters such as her beautiful Snow White, opposite Julia Roberts’s jealous queen, in ­Mirror ­Mirror (2012), but instead she has taken a less predictable route through such offbeat films as Bong Joon Ho’s eco-parable Okja (2017) and David Fincher’s Mank (2020). She might seem an ideal choice to play Polly Pocket in the planned post-­Barbie expansion of the Mattel ­cinematic universe – a film that, she says, is “still very much there”, despite the director Lena Dunham parting ways with the production in the summer. Yet she was also an affecting Fantine in Andrew Davies’s 2018 adaptation of Les Misérables for the BBC, and took a risk the following year playing the serial-killer Ted Bundy’s long-term girlfriend opposite a horribly suave Zac Efron in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. She’s aware, though, that the overwhelming global success of Emily in Paris dwarfs all that she did before it. “It’s funny – it’s almost like anything I did prior to Emily people forget.”
Although new to the stage, Collins has got used to performing in front of an audience while shooting four series of Emily in Paris in the French capital over the past four years. Her social media-savvy marketing exec Emily Cooper often finds herself outdoors (where the filmmakers can make best use of the city’s gorgeous backdrops). “So many people gather around the sets in public spaces,” she says. “Sometimes, there are hundreds of people watching.”
The phenomenon was ­daunting at first, she admits: “I thought I was going to get so easily distracted, also because there are plot points you don’t want to spoil, and you can’t control someone with a cell phone, however many yards away… It jars you. But now I think we’ve all as a cast become so used to that, and it’s a compliment that people are showing up.”
For Collins, too, being on the London stage is a dream come true. “I did theatre as a kid, so it was in me already. I knew I wanted to do it. The West End was the thing in my head; my dad had done it. I grew up going to shows in the West End. I just loved it so much.”
Her father is, of course, Phil Collins, the Genesis drummer and singer. He attended stage school as a boy and was a child actor, starring as the Artful Dodger in the 1960s West End production of Oliver! before pursuing a career in music. Lily is his daughter from his second marriage, to the American actress Jill Tavelman, born at the height of Collins’s solo success, while he was recording the 1989 album … But Seriously. She was raised in a village on the Surrey/Sussex border, spending childhood summers in Switzerland, before her parents divorced and she moved to LA with her mother.
Have father and daughter talked about her stage debut? “When I shared [the news], he was thrilled… he was so excited,” she says. Not only that but, “My father-in-law also performed there,” she adds. Collins is married to the film director Charlie McDowell, son of the British actor ­Malcolm McDowell, the incendiary star of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, who appeared at the Duke of York’s Theatre in 1975 in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane. In London, Collins has her support network close at hand. “My husband and our dog” – the much Instagrammed pug-terrier-cross Redford – “are here, so there’s family time and friends. And obviously there’s an element of it where I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m home.’”
Which makes it all the more amusing that Collins has so successfully cornered the market in fish-out-of-water Americans. “I am half and half, but I’ve always felt more British than American,” she says. “I have played the most American character for five years now. And that was interesting, because I grew up learning French, speaking it, dreaming in it… But then I’m playing a character who is supposed to not understand it, is very American, does not feel comfortable in Europe. And so that at first was a bit ‘What? But I do!’” As she got used to the character, though, she notes, “Playing Emily makes me feel more American,” and she is enjoying the way that the experience of it flows so strongly into Irene.
In the midst of its intense, interpersonal drama, Barcelona is also a political play. Manuel and Irene clash over the chequered backstories of their respective nations: Manuel sneers at the arrogance with which the American pioneers swept westwards, with a belief in their divine right to settle the continent. Irene spits back about the ­colonising Spaniards. 
“I think Irene has been raised to believe that America is the best, and you should be proud to be an American because of our ancestors and what they accomplished and how strong they were,” Collins says. “And I don’t think she’s really ever thought about the implications of these broad statements, of what the history actually was.”
When I ask Morte if the Spanish find the conquistadors a complicated issue, he says, “Not really.” As for his country’s more recent history, he’s “so glad” that Spain saw off the far-Right-leaning Vox party at the ballot box last year. “This rise of the Right was coming,” he says, “and I think the people in Spain saw how dangerous it can be. And we reacted in our last election.”
Collins notes that the play arrives when the US is at a critical juncture of its own – “during an election cycle where a lot is at stake, especially for women and the protection of our reproductive rights” – that finds Left and Right more polarised than ever. “I’m proud to be part of a play that show­cases a dialogue between two people from different backgrounds with differing perspectives, who, through circumstance, are awakened to new ways of viewing the world.”
Barcelona is at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London WC2 (barcelonatheplay.com), from Oct 30-Jan 11
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