Lily Collins is still able to enjoy relative peace and quiet as she sips mint tea in a West Hollywood hotel café. This over-40 business lunch crowd is preoccupied with deals and salads, but if the place were more populated by young social-media savants, she’d be discreetly (or not) snapped and tagged to no end. To her 5.6-million-and-counting Instagram followers, she’s a glamorous but still candid ingénue, supplying a steady stream of coy selfies highlighting her distinctive ink-black eyebrows.
This March Collins’s fans will get an even more intimate look at her life when she publishes Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me, a collection of personal essays inspired by the confessional stories her Instagram community has shared with her. Encouraged by their bravery, Collins, 27, says she showed a “side of myself that was completely raw” in Unfiltered, hence the title. “I can feel a bit freer because I’m not holding as much in.”
In the film world, where she’s been making great strides since débuting as Sandra Bullock’s daughter in The Blind Side seven years ago, Collins is still on the rise. Growing up adjacent to the spotlight as the daughter of ’80s pop icon Phil Collins, she understands that she’s one of many starlets in a race to the top. She’s inching ever closer: Her turn as a ’50s pageant queen in Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply snagged her a Golden Globe nomination. Emma Stone (La La Land) took home the award, but Collins won the Instagram battle: The red-carpet video of her spinning in a pink Zuhair Murad gown garnered more than a million views in 24 hours.
Despite Collins’s very-now brand of social-media fame, her appearance is utterly throwback. Her petite frame swimming in a cozy black sweater, Collins conjures images of Audrey Hepburn, whose boyish femininity and sharp wit “changed a lot of people’s perspectives about what it was to be a woman at that time,” she says. Collins isn’t surprised she’s been tapped for homages to Old Hollywood, including the upcoming Amazon series The Last Tycoon, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1941 novel.
“I’ve always been fascinated with old movie stars and the history of the place that I live in,” Collins says, sweetening her tea with her own bottle of Stevia. “I really love the romanticism and the mystery surrounding the period.”
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