Modern Classic
Lily Collins bridged past and present in one whirlwind year.
By
Krista Smith
Opening photo by
Andrew H. Walker / BAFTA / Shutterstock
“I love watching Old Hollywood actresses speak without speaking,” says Lily Collins, who stars as Rita Alexander in David Fincher’s backstage biographical drama Mank. “It’s in their eyes. It’s in their reactions. The lingering shots allow you to breathe and emote and feel.”
Collins’s character, a bright and upright British stenographer, proves the ideal taskmaster for brilliant but temperamental screenwriter Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz, played by Gary Oldman, as he powers through a first draft of Citizen Kane while holed up in a remote ranch house. Behind the scenes, Collins says it was easy to develop a fondness for her estimable co-star. “Gary brought a playfulness that I wasn’t expecting. I feel like my level of expectation now for a co-star has shifted because Gary just gives everything,” she shares.At 31, she has already worked with an impressive array of industry veterans, from director Bong Joon-ho in Okja, to Warren Beatty, who starred opposite Collins and directed her to a Golden Globe nomination in Rules Don’t Apply. She’s taken on projects as disparate as the Snow White family adventure Mirror Mirror and the drama To the Bone, about a young woman struggling with anorexia. (Collins, a once-aspiring journalist, shared her own struggles with body image in her frank 2017 essay collection, Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me.) The actor currently occupies the title role in Darren Star’s delectable rom-com Emily in Paris, playing a young Chicago woman abroad for the first time. An immediate hit with audiences, the series has been renewed for a second season.While Emily is very much a character of today, Collins says she relished the opportunity that Mank provided to immerse herself in a Hollywood of days gone by: “I treasure those scripts where you know that the stillness is going to speak such volumes. I love that about old movies: An audience can make decisions for themselves about how they feel.”Lily Collins enjoys a moment on the set of Mank
Photo by Gisele Schmidt
Queue’s Krista Smith spoke to Collins for her podcast Present Company.
Krista Smith: You have a hit show. You’re in a David Fincher film, holding your own with Gary Oldman. You got engaged. 2020 has been pretty big for you.Lily Collins shares a scene with Mank co-star Gary Oldman
Let’s talk about the work that you’ve been doing. In Mank, you play a real-life character (the movie is biographical, with some liberties). All your scenes are with Gary Oldman in this ranch house in the middle of nowhere. What was the exchange between the two of you actor to actor?
LC: I met Gary when I was about two years old on the set of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I came on set with my family because our family friends had written Dracula and Hook. They were shooting on the same lot, and my dad [Phil Collins] was in Hook. That’s important in this story because there’s that distinct memory as a kid of having this connection with someone. There’s this nostalgia with Rita, who has never met Mankiewicz, but she has to feel this deep-rooted connection with him. You want to believe as a viewer that she truly respects and loves and admires this person in a nostalgic, familial way. That was already kind of in me with Gary.
Lily Collins on the set of Mank
Photo by Miles Crist
I am opening up way more. I got really tired of feeling like I was trapping myself.
”Lily Collins
Behind the scenes filming Mank
Photo by Gisele Schmidt
You were shooting Mank at the same time you were filming Emily in Paris, flying back and forth. You’re playing this naïve Midwestern girl, completely different from Rita Alexander. Were you surprised by the juggernaut the series became?
LC: Yeah. It was so interesting to play this bright, bold, slightly obvious girl from the Midwest in Europe and then go into a black-and-white world as a British woman in America. The two worlds could not be more opposite. To fly back and forth to play these two characters, it was physically exhausting but so creatively inspiring. I’d be devastated if I hadn’t made it work.
Lily Collins in between scenes
Photo by Gisele Schmidt
The clothes in Emily in Paris are so ridiculous and fun and fabulous.
LC: I don’t even know how I wore those heels every day. I did a quarantine photo shoot where I had to wear heels, and I don’t know if I permanently messed my foot up or pulled a muscle because I hadn’t worn heels in so long. I now look at Emily and I’m like, How did I run around the streets on cobblestones in those crazy heels 24/7? For Season 2, my feet really have to get used to wearing heels again. I don’t know how that’s going to work.
Watch Mank
on Netflix now.
Listen to Lily Collins
on Present Company now.