When the director India Donaldson was struggling to find an actor to lead her subtle and affecting debut feature, Good One, her youngest sister suggested that her best friend might be right for the job. That friend was 19-year-old actor Lily Collias. “We met up for coffee and talked about art for so long,” Lily says of that meeting, speaking at a beachside restaurant hours before Good One’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. “She had me tape and she loved it.” As simply as that, she booked the part.
In Good One, Lily plays Sam, an astute, self-sufficient teen on a camping vacation in the Catskills with her father and his best friend. But the entire film rests on a single line of dialogue that stains what should be an idyllic getaway. Dealing with subjects like family, consent and trust, Lily confidently navigates the film’s meandering yet meaningful and curious conversations. When it screened at Sundance Film Festival, she was quickly lauded as its breakout performer. With a subtle self-possession and on-screen emotional fluency, you’d never guess that it’s her first lead role.
Born to a French mother and Greek father in west Los Angeles, Lily admits that she “never grew up with a family that went camping”. Instead, she spent her childhood summers in her grandmother’s remote village in northern France. There, her creative drive was nurtured in a place where the outdoors let her vivid imagination roam free: “I remember hanging out there as a kid and thinking that I was gonna get eaten by a bear,” she says. “I would plot my little sneak attacks on all my cousins.”
“[I love] all the woo woo of acting. It’s my fucking bread and butter.”
lily collias
Back in Los Angeles, Lily was disciplined in her passion for acting from a young age, learning about the Meisner technique at a local acting studio, and later taking classes at the Lee Strasberg Institute’s LA branch. “You’re at your smartest point in your creativity when you’re a child, and I think it’s allowed me to be really comfortable with characters,” Lily says of that training. “What’s so nice about doing it so young is I don’t have a technique.” Even so, she says she loves “all the woo woo of acting” that those schools taught her. “It’s my fucking bread and butter.”
Her pursuit of performing was put on pause during the Coronavirus pandemic, but in 2021, she stumbled on an Instagram post looking for people to audition for Palm Trees and Power Lines, an Independent Spirit Award-nominated drama about a teenage girl’s abusive relationship with an older man. Lily landed a minor role in the film, which ended up being a critical hit. “Even just working on that for two days restarted everything in my brain,” she says.
Later, she left LA for New York to study drama at the New School, where she fell in love with Annie Baker’s plays and the prospect of writing stories of her own. But since Good One’s success, the actor has taken a break from university to reorient, and has already lined up a new project with the A24 horror Altar, starring Kyle MacLachlan.
Legends like Paul Thomas Anderson are on her dream collaborator checklist, but for now, Lily feels content with making movies with up-and-coming filmmakers. “My heart always stays with low-budget indies,” she says. “I know one day I’ll have to make a house payment – when that day comes, I’ll do it – but I’m not there yet!”