Lily Allen has revealed that she is more focused on building her acting career than music as she says that she doesn’t “quite understand” the medium any more. 

Allen’s music career began in 2005 when she made some of her vocal recordings public on Myspace, which resulted in airplay on BBC Radio 1 and a contract with Regal Recordings. Her first mainstream single “Smile” reached number one on the UK Singles Chart in July 2006.

More recently, however, the award-winning singer-songwriter has been juggling life between the UK whilst starring in West End plays in London, and her lavish home in New York, which she shares with her actor husband, David Harbour, and two children, Ethel, 11, and Marnie, 10, from her previous marriage to Sam Cooper. 

In 2021 Allen played the lead in the West End production of 2:22: A Ghost Story, directed by Matthew Dunster. She won Best Actress at the Whatonstage Awards and was nominated for a Leading Actress Olivier Award for her performance. This year she also played the role of Katurian in Martin McDonagh’s brutal, bloody play The Pillowman, in London. In April, she also made her TV debut in Dreamland, the Sharon Horgan-executive produced TV drama about a dysfunctional family in Margate.   

In a new interview with Grazia UK magazine, Allen has revealed that she wants to chase her acting goals despite finding playing her roles in ‘2:22 A Ghost Story’ and ‘The Pillowman’ “utterly terrifying”. She commented: “I don’t think I’ve ever been more scared than before the opening nights. The fear of failure, she says, is worse than with music. ‘Nobody can tell me that I’m being bad at being Lily Allen!’ 

She continued: “I’m a mum. It sounds so tragic and sad. I sort of feel like I’ve had my career. I know I’m only 38.

“I want to be around my kids. I want to break a cycle in terms of, you know, showing up for my children.

“When I was younger, you were told that you could have it all. I believed that when I got pregnant, and then when I had my children, I realised that was a lie. You can't and you have to make sacrifices. It’s usually the children that suffer as a result of those sacrifices – and I’m just not willing to do it to them.”

She points out now that she is in a luxurious financial position to be able to let her career take a back seat – but working less is, nevertheless, a decision. ‘I really fucking loved having a full-throttle career, which I can’t do any more.’

Professionally, as well as acting, Allen is working on music, and has just applied to do a creative writing course. ‘I’m doing lots of things,’ she reveals. ‘There’s not an end game.’ 

The acclaimed British star added that even though she has been working on music she does feel “slightly confused as a creator” as she thinks “the medium’s evolved somewhere that I don’t quite understand.” 

During the interview, Allen also reflects on whether culture has evolved since the toxic media landscape of the noughties. The singer-turned-actor was discussing a past appearance on annual comedy series The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, which went viral after rape allegations surfaced against Russell Brand in September. Allen commented on offensive jokes made by Brand, Jimmy Carr and Jonathan Ross in 2007.

She says she knows, looking back, that attitudes were bad then: there’s a clip of her doing the rounds ‘where I was on a chat show with Russell Brand and Noel Fielding and Jonathan Ross. And there are comments, I think, about me being raped or something. And I laugh along with it. In retrospect, that’s really horrendous. It makes me uncomfortable, but I don’t think I felt that at the time, because it was the culture.’

As for tabloid-style meanness, she says: ‘The medium has changed – I think, in the noughties, it used to be the press that did the monstering, and now I think social media does that.’

Read the full interview with Lily Allen for the Grazia UK Magazine November 2023 issue and check out the video below.