Lily Collias Talks ‘Cape Fear,’ Amy Adams and Her Breakout After ‘Good One’

Despite growing up in Los Angeles, it took moving across the country for Lily Collias to properly begin her life as an actor.

“It’s strange how it works out that way,” the 21-year-old says. “My dad was always like, ‘why wouldn’t you just stay here?’ But I had a partner whose parents were directors in documentaries and they were like, ‘if we’re ever sourcing actors, we go to New York because everyone in L.A. is botched.’”

After a breakout performance in a Sundance movie, Collias is starring in “Cape Fear,” the Apple TV+ series adaptation of the 1957 novel “The Executioners,” previously brought to screen in films in both 1962 and 1991. The show, which follows an ex-convict who seeks revenge on the lawyer who represented him, stars Javier Bardem, Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson, and is produced by Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. 

Collias developed an interest in acting from a young age, but early brushes with the industry diverted her. 

“My sweet mother would take me to West Hollywood, we would go at traffic hour after school to go to these auditions. It’s a very strange, alienating experience, I think, to be doing auditions that young, because I was looking at these rooms of parents where they are the reason their child is there,” Collias says. “And it made me kind of uncomfortable how strange it all was to me. I could see mothers whose dying passion is just thrown onto their child.”

Instead, she shifted her focus to painting in high school (her grandfather was a painter in Boise, Idaho) and explored her creativity via other mediums. 

The pandemic disrupted much of her high school experience, which resulted in a “weird gap of time where I was honestly just sitting in a room with myself thinking about my future in a way that felt so intangible.” It was during that period that the idea of returning to acting started to percolate. 

During her senior year, a friend of a friend reached out encouraging Collias to audition for the movie “Good One,” which premiered at Sundance and jump-started Collias’ career. She looked into Juilliard, but the audition process started to remind her of those uncomfortable rooms from her childhood: “the girl in Hamilton earrings is giving me the death stare after I say ‘good luck.’” Instead, she ended up at the New School to study playwriting, which got her to New York, where she’s been ever since. 

When Collias received the script for “Cape Fear” in her inbox, the show’s heavy-hitters were already confirmed, making it a no-brainer, but the character of Natalie is what really drew her in.

“I think I just really fall towards things that are deeply humane and also in the same vein, empathizing. I think that the things we hate the most about ourselves are actually what makes us relatable and able to center ourselves with other people. And I thought that this adaptation was so interesting specifically because you kind of begin to hate and love every single person in it,” Collias says. “It’s nonlinear in that way where you are on your own journey and in limbo with how you’re feeling. I love when things feel delicate in that way and are passed to the audience in a way of their own decisions. And I thought Natalie was such a very blessed character in the sense that she’s kind of a witness to everything: she feels like an audience member. When she has all of her gates open, I think it made me deeply relate to that feeling of loss of innocence and girlhood being taken away.”

Throughout the course of filming, she became especially close with Adams, who plays her mother in the show and emerged as a mother figure for Collias in real life.

“That’s my girl. I adore her,” Collias says. “When I am around her, I find this childlike wonder to her that I admire so deeply.”

With “Cape Fear” wrapping up its season on Friday, Collias is back to looking for her next big thing, and spending her time in between gardening, attending a family reunion and writing.

“I think I definitely overworked myself last year. I worked basically 11 months out of the year, and that was definitely not healthy and I needed time off to recalibrate and be with my body and my mind,” she says. “But now I’m just hungry to work.”