Lily Collins has said she realised that she needed to gain weight when magazines refused to feature her, making her fear that it would hamper her acting success.
The actress and daughter of Phil Collins has struggled in the past with eating disorders and plays an anorexic in her new film, To The Bone.
She told Net-A-Porter’s digital magazine The Edit: “I was about to embark on press for (film) Rules Don’t Apply and I was told that a lot of media did not want to put me in their magazines.
“Not just on the cover – they wouldn’t put me inside looking the way I did, even though it was for a movie.
“No one knew my connection to the disorder, and at the time I was super upset because I thought, this is a huge moment for me and I can’t maximise on it.
“But it hit me – ‘Oh, this is going to majorly f*** with your career now, not just your health.’
“I told my publicist that if I could snap my fingers and gain 10 pounds right that second, I would give anything to do that.
“I never thought I’d ever say anything like that – this cannot keep me from what I’ve always wanted.”
Collins added that working on her new feature about people with eating disorders had also acted as a kind of therapy for her own life.
She said: “There’s a scene in the film when we’re in group therapy talking about the euphoria we experience – I’d never heard that weird enjoyment we feel from being in the disorder worded that way before – and in that moment, you caught Lily understanding it as opposed to just Ellen, my character.”
The full interview with Lily Collins is on The Edit at www.net-a-porter.com/magazine/408/12 or download The Edit’s free app for iPhone, iPad and Android.
