In January, 19-year-old Lily Collias’s life changed. She was on winter break from her first semester at the New School when Good One, the feature film in which she stars, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Directed by India Donaldson, the drama is a heart-wrenching depiction of a father and daughter’s relationship over the course of a short camping trip in upstate New York. It relies on Collias’s stunningly natural portrayal of Sam, a teenage girl who grows increasingly disillusioned as the weekend draws to a close.
With the well-received premiere of Good One, which hits theaters August 9, suddenly, Collias went from a college freshman to a rising star with a flooded Instagram inbox and a Louis Vuitton wardrobe.
“It was such an incredible experience. People started reaching out, and I was like, I can do what I’ve dreamt of doing: I’m going to work full time,” she says one July morning in the restaurant of the Metrograph, downtown New York’s cool kid movie theater of choice.
Collias’s face has become something of a mascot for Metrograph, which is launching its new distribution arm with Good One. But she’s also still figuring out this whole acting and nascent fame thing. Good One is an intimate story without any major stars, but its release is already surrounded by positive buzz, with Collias at the center of all the praise. After Sundance, it also traveled to the Cannes Film Festival, playing in the Directors’s Fortnight section.
Even though Louis Vuitton dresses Collias for occasions like that now, she panicked while deciding what to wear for her press day.
“I tried to dress nice today, and then I got freaked out and scared, so I put on some good old pants that are ripping in my butthole,” she says with a laugh. She paired them with combat boots on an inordinately hot summer day.
The monochrome look is very New York, which is where Collias currently lives, but she’s a recent transplant from Los Angeles, where she grew up. Despite being interested in acting from a young age, her parents were not in the entertainment industry—a fact she’s quick to mention. Instead, her mom researched classes online and took her to study at The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in Hollywood. She didn’t do theater while attending Santa Monica High School, finding the program cliquey. But she did start working professionally. She booked a small role in the 2023 indie Palm Trees and Power Lines, which also premiered at Sundance, after a casting director reached out to her through Instagram.
Getting the role in Good One was a similar stroke of fate. Donaldson, who makes her feature debut with the film, had been searching for Sam for two months when she reached out to her younger sister, Octavia, for suggestions. Octavia recommended Donaldson get in touch with Collias, a friend. “I think she only said that because she was at my house the night prior, and I was just like, doing a bit with her,” Collias remembers. “I don’t think she knew that I professionally acted.”
Donaldson and Collias quickly clicked over coffee, discussing art, music, and life. Donaldson decided to wait to shoot the project until the summer after Collias graduated high school. In the meantime, the young actress got to see the script evolve. “It felt like I kind of knew secrets,” she says.
Collias prepared to play Sam by writing as her character, an exercise that helped her figure out how to play a part in which emotions are portrayed more with glances than dialogue. “That was a fun way for me to get to know her on another level,” Collias says.
Donaldson also set up Zoom calls between Collias and James Le Gros, who plays Sam’s dad Chris, the adult on the trip along with his best friend Matt (Danny McCarthy). Collias says they were quick to establish a father-daughter dynamic even before the under-two-week shoot in the Catskills. Their relationship made Chris’s on-screen betrayal, which comes after an uncomfortable incident with Matt, even more heartbreaking to play.
The genius of Collias’s performance rests in the ways she reacts to the two men surrounding her, conveying pity, disgust, and ultimately sorrow with a teenager’s beyond-her-years wisdom. As Chris and Matt commiserate about their divorces and bad decisions, Collias observes them with an amused exasperation that curdles as the film progresses. When she does speak up, they praise her insights only to ultimately write her off. It makes Good One a brilliant addition to the canon of films about girlhood, one that is deeply savvy about the ways in which a girl like Sam can both humor and be utterly devastated by the grown men around her.
Collias says she never puts too much of herself into her characters and explains she’s a lot less internal than Sam. Still, she does identify with Sam on some levels. “I am a teenage daughter to a father,” she says wryly. “I understand what that looks like, and I understand dealing with older men that are just so disappointing, like continuously.”
If the process of shooting was like a mini-version of film school for Collias, the Sundance experience was an introduction to the promotional side of the business. Louis Vuitton was in her DMs as soon as the festival lineup was announced. “When they reached out, I thought it was a scam account,” she says.
She’s still new to the world of fashion, but she’s developing her personal style, and LV now understands her taste. “Now most of the things on my rack are all black, which is how it should be for me,” she adds, giggling.
Following Sundance, she also had a month of meetings with managers who wanted to represent her, eventually landing with a team she considers “genuine angels.” She already has her next project lined up: a starring part in an A24 horror movie titled Altar alongside January Jones and Kyle MacLachlan. She wants to ensure she honors Good One in what she chooses to do next.
“I want to do it justice by curating and really loving the projects that I work on,” she says. “I don’t take that lightly, and I think it’s made me feel really confident in my next project.”
And as for college? She tried to make part-time work, but The New School took away her scholarship. She eventually wants to go back to school. For now, though, it will have to wait.