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Lily Collias has a lot going on. Between doing press for her breakout role in Good One, out on August 9th, the 19-year-old actress is moving to a new apartment in New York, she tells Teen Vogue over coffee and croissants at the Lower East Side movie theater Metrograph. If you don’t know who Collias is, just wait — you’re about to.
Written and directed by India Donaldson, Good One follows Sam (Collias), a young queer woman, who goes on a hiking trip with her father, Chris (James Le Gros) and his best friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy) where tensions arise. When Good One premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, it received incredible reviews for Donaldson’s smart story and beautiful direction, but also for Collias’s star-making performance. Since its premiere earlier this year, Collias and the film have been all over the place, most recently Cannes.
Sitting across the table, Collias is curled up in her chair, wearing green cargo pants and having another coffee of the day. Cannes, she describes, was a surreal experience. Good One played in the prestigious Director’s Fortnight, dedicated to independent films. Collias didn’t get to see any films, but she was there with her family and encountered some exes.
It’s easy to see why Donaldson wanted Collias for the role of Sam — she’s preternaturally self-assured for her age, something that echoes in the character. She’s even wearing the heart choker with turquoise that Sam wears throughout the film, although judging from Collias’s Instagram that necklace is a staple of hers as well.
Getting cast in Good One first came to Collias as a bit of luck. Her best friend, Octavia, is Donaldson’s half sister, and when Collias met Donaldson, an immediate rapport was cemented between the two. “I remember just feeling excitement about this story and knowing that there's something that needs to be said, but not shoving it in people's faces is such an interesting way to storytell that I'm very fond of,” she says, scratching her wrist. Collias gets distracted, recognizing that the faint music playing in the theater’s cafe is musician Arthur Russell, something that lights her face up.
They shot for 12 days upstate, and the prep time consisted of Collias doing Zooms with LeGros and McCarthy just shooting the shit and getting to know one another. “It still felt so playful, which was so nice because with such a short amount of time, it's kind of scary in the way that it's like, how are we realistically going to get this done? But India came in so organized and so confident and really just led me.”
The trifecta at the heart of Good One begins tensely when Matt’s son who is supposed to join them on the hiking trip doesn’t come because he’s mad at his father. The trip that ensues, and eventually hits a boiling point, has dynamics that are instantly recognizable for any woman who has felt bulldozed by men. Sam ends up taking on the caretaker role between her father and Matt, making their meals and cleaning up, but also listening to their tales about failed marriages and failed careers — a heavy load of emotional labor. Donaldson never parses judgment on the two men until a boundary is crossed, and much of the initial commentary on the dynamic between the three of them is completely told on Sam’s face.
Even during our interview, Collias’s face scrunches up in many emotions with her light blue-green eyes always thoughtful yet serene. Her ability to show Sam’s thoughts without a word, especially once things come to a head, gives so much silent context to a story that feels embedded in the marrow of being a woman. A lot of that subtlety came from the relationship between Donaldson and Collias when working on the film. “India was so intuitive,” she says.
There’s a lot in Good One that slips under the skin, unshakeable, and even more so on repeat viewings. Much of that is in the role Sam plays between her father and his best friend and the ways they continually write off her queer identity — and her agency and burgeoning independence. “Sam's queerness is dismissed and observed in such interesting ways that I think that most older men do. ‘At least she can't get pregnant,’ where if she was a boy, it would be such a different type of conversation. Little things like that where it's like, ‘I regard that you like girls. Lemme tell you about how my boy likes girls,’” she says.
A lot of the film, Collias sees Sam trying to find opportunities for herself to be seen by her father primarily, but she’s constantly pushed aside. “She ultimately is always disappointed because she's not seen. It's just set up for her in the way that it is just something that they didn't even think about. They're just like she's going to clean the bowls after she makes the dinner. They don't even place themselves in the position to try to see what this trip is for her.”
She’s talked to friends — both men and women — after seeing the film and has noticed the differences in how people interpret Sam’s discomfort. “I think that's what most or all women come out thinking and it's interesting to see how fast people pick up the uncomfortability,” Collias says. “I had some guy friends that watched it that were like, ‘If I'm being completely honest, this is me being a boy. I didn't realize that she was uncomfortable until it was just her and Matt alone.’ And then I have girlfriends that are like, ‘Ever since his son didn't get in the car, I was just uncomfortable with her the entire time.’”
There’s other markers of girl and womanhood that permeate Good One that only women will relate to. Talking about the markers of girlhood and womanhood that are the small hallmarks of Good One gets Collias chatty, gesticulating with her hands, silver bracelets on her wrists, and one purple painted fingernail popping with color. Throughout the film, we see Sam duck into the woods, inserting a tampon — something that happens so infrequently in film that seeing the repetition of these small moments feel instantly radical. Collias jokes, “Once I do it, it's just one and done and it's just going to sit in there,” referring to tampons in film. But she sees Sam’s tampon changing as a rare moment she has to herself amidst these men.
Despite what Sam’s experience is on this trip, it’s thrilling to eventually see her take her power back — which comes back to the title of the film, the idea of the “good one” in a family. That’s something that Donaldson and Collias discussed and something that resonated with Collias. “I just knew from the start that in my world, my brother was always a good one. He was the older sibling and I was the younger sibling that never did what she was supposed to be doing,” she laughs. “I understood what it was from another perspective, and I have so much respect for the good ones of the family because they take on so much and they're so diligent.”
Not being the “good one” led Collias to different places. As a depressed teenager, her cat Billy, a gorgeous creamy fluffy guy with bright blue eyes, was her “knight in shining armor.” Growing up in Los Angeles, she lived with her family right by The Aero, a beloved theater that frequently shows classics, is where she got her film education. Her parents don’t work in the industry (her father works in business) but were supportive of her pursuing acting, with her mother driving her to classes at Lee Strassberg in Hollywood. But at one point she stopped. “It foundationally changed my perspective on things and then I stopped because I didn't like what it was at school, what it meant to be,” she says. “I just found it really cliquey and I found people really, for the most part, evil. They were just not very kind.”
New York was a place that Collias has wanted to be since the 6th grade, but always found it daunting and financially unreasonable. When she landed Good One, it allowed her parents to let her see where her career could take her. After one semester at school, Collias decided to take a break, instead throwing herself into learning about all types of art, “what connects me to life,” she says. Learning hands on is something that she feels benefits her greatly. “I've always been work oriented. I feel like I learned so much more on sets and in an acting class. You have to see it and understand what everyone else is doing in this weird dance that you do together to make these things possible.”
Right now, she has been taking welding classes, writing plays and screenplays, painting, and surrounding herself with a group of friends who are artists in many other fields. She’s back on set, and while she can’t tell me what she’s working on, her time on Good One has helped prepare her for what’s next. “I'm excited to be working on a set again. I've learned so much about the industry through this process that I feel like I've dipped my toes in and I'm not blinded, but now I'm just like, ‘I will love to just get back on set again.’”
Weeks after I talk to Collias, it’s announced she’ll be starring in Altar, a horror movie from A24, just one of lined up projects. But when we spoke, she was just ready to reunite with Donaldson and the Good One cast and crew. “I'm so excited to see the Good One premiere and how everyone's going to be back together,” she says excitedly. She’ll already be fully moved into her new place once Good One premieres, nestling into a new home, ready for a brand new chapter of her life.
