Lily Allen remembers hitting her rock bottom when she turned up at her ex-husband’s house after he started a new relationship. “I drank myself into oblivion. I went over to his house and started screaming at him, woke the kids up, you know, really distressed the children,” she says. “They remember that. And they know that I was under the influence then, and that it’s important that Mummy avoids getting into those situations.”
Allen, 39, is many things — pop star, actress, podcaster and, in an unlikely twist, OnlyFans foot pin-up (more on that later) — but perhaps her biggest achievement in a very public life has been quietly getting sober. Allen is now more than five years clean and attends 12-step meetings regularly. More than anything, her sobriety has given her family peace of mind. “My kids feel safe,” she says. “That’s the main thing for me. I felt very unsafe in my childhood, and my kids feel safe.”
We’re talking by video call. I make a poor stand-in for her podcast co-host and childhood friend Miquita Oliver, but at least Allen is sitting on the tiger-print swivel chair familiar from video clips of Miss Me?, their headline-grabbing show.
She’s not in the happiest of moods at first. Wearing a cosy-looking black sweater, she lifts her eyes to a window in her Brooklyn townhouse. “I’m not great. It’s a pretty rainy, dreary day in New York. My mood is quite affected by the weather. Today seems to be, like, the first grim, grey day of the season.”
It’s 10am in New York, 3pm in London. In the afternoon Lily has a painful-sounding facial booked; microneedling. “That’s going to hurt and my face is going to be all red and blotchy. Then my kids [daughters Marnie, 11, and Ethel, 13] are coming home from school, and I’ll cook something for dinner, and then I think I’ll probably have a relatively early night.” She sounds content. Yesterday she made a six-hour spaghetti bolognese (a Marcella Hazan recipe), so today’s effort will be a little less ambitious — chicken and veg.
First, though, we’re here to talk about sobriety, and Allen’s new role as an ambassador for the Forward Trust, the addiction charity whose patron is the Princess of Wales. On Monday Allen will appear as part of the charity’s events to mark Addiction Awareness Week.
As we settle in I blurt out that I’m an alcoholic too, over three years down the same road of recovery. She softens, saying: “Well done.” It’s heartfelt.
With her puppy Jude, a white chihuahua mix, on her lap, she is open and honest, but there is obvious unease. Fellow alcoholic or not, there is a looming sense that whatever she tells me will be chopped up for clickbait and tossed on to social media for another game of out-of-context opinion slinging. It’s an almost biweekly occurrence after each instalment of Miss Me?. “It’s really annoying. It comes back to bite me all the time. I put myself out there and I get absolutely pilloried for it by people, and it’s f***ing painful. It’s really, really painful.”
The podcast, a refreshingly unfiltered chat between Allen and Oliver, has become a huge hit; it’s one of the BBC’s top podcasts and gaining an audience around the globe. “I don’t really feel the success of it that much,” Allen says. “I hear it’s very popular.”
Since her bestselling autobiography, My Thoughts Exactly, was published in 2018, and with the podcast now connecting her even more directly to her audience, Allen’s candour and openness have seemed like superpowers. She has banished the tabloid caricature of an irascible, petulant nepo baby — a fiction she refers to as “cartoon Lily” — and replaced it with what seems a more relatable, authentic version of herself.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily something to be proud of. I’m not trying to be shocking or outspoken. I always get called outspoken. I just don’t have the ability to stop myself saying what comes into my brain. I think it’s the intersection of addiction and neurodivergency,” she says, referencing her diagnosis last year of ADHD, a condition some studies suggest affects as many as one in three addicts.
• Lily Allen and Miquita Oliver take on the middle-aged podcast bros
She might not see it as her greatest strength, but she knows her honesty has probably helped others. “I think my moral compass is pretty good, so when I’m sharing intimate details about my life, I’m looking for people to connect or to resonate, or to validate the things that are going on in my head.”
She sees the charity role as a chance to make a difference. “Sobriety or addiction is something that I have real-life experience with, and can talk truthfully and openly about. Addicts are everywhere. We’re all around you. We look like your mum, your dad, your kids, your best friends. Coming to terms with that part of yourself can feel incredibly isolating.
“The journey of sobriety isn’t singular, and it isn’t linear. So if sharing my own experiences and struggles helps even just one person process what they’re going through, then it’s all worth it.”
Her earliest memories involve being around drink and drugs and she has spoken about seeing her father, the actor and comedian Keith Allen, using cocaine. “I think that addiction runs deep in my family, so self-medicating was going to be on the cards. For me, it didn’t really feel like an ‘if’, it was a ‘when’.”
Her wild years were documented through paparazzi lenses and occasional public displays of drunkenness, memorably telling Elton John to f*** off at the GQ awards in 2008. (She recently revealed that she’d resented him for years, thinking he hadn’t replied to a heartfelt letter she sent him, only to find the letter, unsent, among her belongings when she moved to New York.)
Allen’s behaviour spiralled as her first marriage, to Sam Cooper, a builder, broke down in 2016. “I’d sort of exhausted all of my options in terms of my outlets for acting out. I was engaging in pretty crazy sex stuff, drug stuff, alcohol. I would sit there in my bed and think, ‘Maybe now’s the time for heroin because nothing’s working any more.’ Luckily I didn’t get there, because I wouldn’t be here right now.”
Allen says her daughters understand the value of her regular AA meetings — in person on Saturdays and Sundays, and Zoom meetings between. “In fact they kind of monitor me,” she adds. “Ethel sometimes will be like, ‘Aren’t you going to one of your meetings?’ ‘I did one online this morning.’ ‘Are you sure?’ They know that it takes work, and that it’s something that I have to prioritise.”
The decision to commit to sobriety came soon after that rock-bottom moment at her ex-husband’s house. Another humiliating incident with Cooper followed, after which Allen recalls ordering a gin and tonic when meeting a friend, who said: “Oh, you really need that drink.”
“I remember feeling so incensed,” she says. “When they were in the bathroom I was like, ‘Why do I feel so angry at somebody insinuating that I need this drink?’ And it was because I did. It really had control over me. I just felt like I was no longer in control of my own destiny. I went to a meeting the next morning.”
In her book, published shortly before she got sober, she said she was not an addict or alcoholic. That has changed, she tells me. “I was in denial. I don’t think I’ve ever been ashamed to call myself a drug addict or an alcoholic. I just didn’t really want to, because I didn’t really want to give up.”
Since then, she says, “I’ve just felt relief for being with like-minded people that wanted to do something about their problem.”
Allen married the Stranger Things actor David Harbour, 49, during the pandemic in 2020 at the Graceland Chapel in Las Vegas, in a ceremony officiated by an Elvis impersonator, with Marnie and Ethel present. Harbour is sober too — more than 20 years — but she says: “We don’t really talk about it.” Despite that, it’s a very different kind of relationship.
“I don’t think I’d ever had sex with anybody not drunk before I got together with him. So that was different for sure. It’s a totally different thing. It’s unavoidable, conscious and real. He had a lot of experience with it, so it’s been helpful to do it with someone that’s long-in-the-tooth in that game,” she says, laughing.
Despite the success of her podcast, she says she would choose her work on OnlyFans — the subscription service that typically features explicit content — over podcasting, but “only because I get more money and less shit”. Allen shares images of her feet to roughly a thousand paying subscribers under the name Lily Allen FTSE500.
She may have started a trend. This week Kate Nash, who was part of the same Noughties boom in British female singer-songwriters, announced her own foray into the porn-friendly platform. Saying artists can no longer afford to tour, Nash posted an image from her new OnlyFans page to Instagram with the caption “Bum’s gone viral”.
• Caitlin Moran: If Lily Allen can make cash from her feet, why not me?
Though she has mooted a potential 20th anniversary tour of her breakthrough album, Alright, Still, which features the huge hit Smile, in 2026, Allen says she feels distant from her early music. “I was a kid when I wrote those songs, so I didn’t f***ing know what was going on. I just wrote about the world as I saw it at the time.”
From the outside the past five years have appeared to be something of a renaissance. Aside from the podcast, she’s launched her acting career, receiving an Olivier nomination for her performance in 2:22 A Ghost Story, starring in The Pillowman in the West End, and the comedy series Dreamland on Sky.
Ultimately, though, it’s her music she measures herself by. As she describes her struggles to make a new album, she breaks down in tears. Sober, it seems to mean more. “It’s really sad. I’m trying, I’m trying really hard, but I just don’t like anything that I’m doing. I don’t like listening back to it. Don’t like playing it. I won’t play it to other people. I’m really embarrassed and really shy about it.”
But she lights up when asked about the gifts of her sobriety, telling me about the simple pleasures that are richer now that the chaos of the past has settled. “I find it’s the friends that I’ve met in sobriety, and the connectedness that I have with them, and just doing normal things, like going for coffee and walks in the park, and reading books, watching TV, going to the movies, going to the theatre. I tend to do more cultural things, going to art galleries and really appreciating the creative output of others.
“I don’t want to go to a nightclub. As soon as I can tell that people have started taking cocaine I’m out of there. It’s not because I feel tempted. It’s just because it’s boring, quite frankly, and I don’t really like standing up that much.”
Asked if she gets “high on life”, she laughs. “I like the hot and cold plunge thing. I’m not very good at listening to my body, so that really helps me to feel more centred. And I’m going to the gym. I do weights and conditioning twice a week, and Pilates twice a week. I love all of that.”
The hard work for Allen and the charity will be helping to raise awareness among those in crisis. Drug-related deaths are at a 30-year high in the UK and alcohol-related deaths have soared since the pandemic, with concerns growing about the rise of gambling addiction and related suicides. Men die at double the rate women do from drink and drugs, but new polling by the Forward Trust revealed an alarming reluctance among women to ask for help with their drink and drug habits.
“My advice,” Allen says, “would be if you think you need help — if there’s a chance you need help — go and ask for it, because what is there to lose?”
If you are living with addiction or dependency, or know someone who is, contact the Forward Trust at takingactiononaddiction.org.uk
Lily Allen’s perfect weekend
Lark or owl?
Lark
Green juice or fry-up?
Fry-up
Trainers or heels?
Trainers
West London or Brooklyn?
West London
Billie Eilish or Olivia Rodrigo?
Tie
Signature dish?
Spaghetti bolognese
Rivals or Day of the Jackal?
Rivals
Last thing you googled?
Ludlow House — it’s a Soho House-owned venue in New York. I don’t know why
I couldn’t get through the weekend without…
… a roast
