Lily Collins, the actress who made displacement her defining role

The show she is most associated with is also the one critics have most consistently underestimated. Emily in Paris is a Netflix production about naivety triumphing over sophistication, about an American’s refusal to feel unwelcome in a city that has spent centuries perfecting its disdain for that attitude. Lily Collins has played that character across five seasons, with a sixth in production — and the critical conversation around the show has changed less than the show itself. Critics still dismiss it. The audience still watches it.

Collins was born in Guildford, Surrey, England, to Phil Collins and his second wife, American Jill Tavelman. She grew up in Los Angeles after her parents’ divorce when she was seven, becoming one of those people who belongs fully to neither country they inhabit. She started in front of cameras before she could read, appearing in a BBC sitcom at the age of two, and spent her teens writing columns for Elle Girl and contributing to Seventeen, Teen Vogue, and the Los Angeles Times. Acting was one option among several for a young woman who was also, inconveniently, the daughter of one of the most famous musicians alive.

The inconvenience of that last fact shaped the early career in ways she has been candid about. A supporting role in The Blind Side gave her a first foothold in Hollywood. Mirror Mirror made her a marketable name in the YA fantasy space that studios were strip-mining through the early 2010s. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones arrived at the peak of that particular trend, did average business, and did not lead to sequels. Love, Rosie was a more adult romantic comedy, directed with taste, that found its audience on home video rather than at the box office. The industry’s read on Collins in this period was “promising, not yet proven” — the kind of assessment that follows an actress through years of projects she made work without getting full credit for.

The turn came on two films released back-to-back. In Rules Don’t Apply, Warren Beatty cast her as a young actress navigating 1950s Hollywood, and the work earned her a Golden Globe nomination. In To the Bone, she played a young woman in treatment for anorexia — drawing on documented personal experience that she wrote about in her memoir Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me, published the same year. Both films asked something genuine of her, and she delivered it. The critical consensus shifted, at least modestly.

The prestige period that followed would have satisfied most working actresses: Fantine in the BBC’s Les Misérables, Bette Davis’ secretary in David Fincher’s Mank, Ted Bundy’s long-term girlfriend in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. This was the body of work that explained why a director of Fincher’s exacting standards cast her. It was also, notably, the work that did not put her face on every magazine cover at once.

Emily in Paris did. The show launched in 2020, was immediately polarizing, and built an audience that did not care about the controversy. Collins is both the lead and an executive producer — she is not an actress who wandered into a runaway success and came along for the ride. She is one of the people who kept it in production through five seasons and helped shape its sixth, currently filming in Greece and Monaco, which its creators have confirmed will be its last. The show ends because they decided it should.

Here is the critical layer that the show’s admirers usually skip: Emily in Paris is not sophisticated television. Its Paris is a postcard, its conflicts are polite, and its heroine makes professional decisions that would get a real marketing consultant fired before the end of her first week. The critics who point this out are not wrong. What they have gotten consistently wrong is the implication that Collins does not know this. She knows. The show is doing something specific — optimism as a mode, pleasure as a defended position, the American capacity to remain cheerful in the face of European irony — and Collins performs it with a technical consistency that the show’s lightness should not be allowed to obscure.

Away from the show, the work has continued. A daughter born via surrogacy in 2025. A live-action Polly Pocket film in production, which she is also producing. A project about the making of the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in which she will play Audrey Hepburn, again combining the acting and producing roles she has come to pair. The Audrey Hepburn comparison is one the industry has been making at Collins for years — the bone structure, the European setting, the gap between the elegant image and the demanding private work underneath it. She appears to be meeting that comparison directly, and on her own terms.

Season 6 of Emily in Paris wraps a story she helped build from its first episode. What she builds next is the more interesting question, and the one for which there is currently no answer.