InStyle has released an interview featuring Lily, where she speaks about her new film Mank, celebrating her engagement at home, and what she thinks Emily Cooper would be doing in quarantine. You can read the interview and watch Lily answer some fan e-mail below, plus check our gallery for outtakes from the photo session!
This story, like many set in the never-ending stress dream that is 2020, begins with technical difficulties.
“I should be better at this point,” Lily Collins tells me when we finally manage to connect over Zoom. “I still find myself floundering,” she says, referring to the mechanics of our new normal: virtual interviews and FaceTime photoshoots, a once foreign vernacular that includes ring light settings and meeting room codes.
Despite the admitted at-home learning curve, Collins’s comfort with communication (of any form) is clear. Appearing on-screen in a pale pink sweater with shoulder cut-outs, her long brown hair parted down the middle and flowing unreservedly across her chest (the way the YouTube tutorial tells you it should — but it never does), she seems at-ease, eager even.
It feels like a clapperboard has been slammed shut, “action!” called on the first take of the day. Collins’s energy is high and her answers profuse — words spilling out in a race against the 60-minute clock that is our conversation. Of course, this isn’t the first take of the day — minutes before our interview Collins was finishing up another, and just hours later she was playing a game of faux tennis on her mother’s court for our photoshoot. Then came the virtual premiere of her new Netflix film, Mank. Even in this state of quarantine, the action never stops.
On the rare occasion she has been able to slow down, she’s dedicated her time to self-reflection, as this period marks the longest stretch of the 31-year-old’s adult life that she’s spent at home, temporarily liberated from the upheaval of international press tours and on-location shoots.