What Lily Collins Loves About Her Life Abroad (& No, It's Not In Paris)

Actress Lily Collins is a woman of the world, so to speak. She's a dual British-American citizen, being the daughter of legendary English musician Phil Collins and American businesswoman Jill Tavelman. While you might assume she's based in Hollywood given her starring role as Emily Cooper on the Netflix romcom series "Emily in Paris," in reality, Lily and her husband, director Charlie McDowell, made a new home for themselves in Copenhagen sometime in 2023, per Vogue. And according to the star, she loves just about everything about life in the Danish capital.

"Life here is just so wonderful and so calm and bright," Lily said in a September 2023 interview with Elle Danmark (via TikTok). "What I love so much is that there's so much color and, yet, it's so calm. I love being able to bike everywhere. It feels like a big city but also very intimate, and everyone is so nice." The "Tolkien" star added more to the list of things she loves about Copenhagen in a YouTube video shared by Netflix Nordic in September 2024. "The food is to die for," she said. "I don't think there's anywhere in the world where the bread is better."

While speaking with Elle Danmark, Lily also praised the Scandinavian city's approach to fashion design. "I just love that anything goes here," she said. "You can mix any pattern, print, color, texture. And everyone just feels themselves and unique, and I just love that about all the fashion that I see."

Interestingly, Lily Collins and Charlie McDowell have very similar national identities. Like his wife, the "Legion" director has a British father and an American mother. Charlie's father is acclaimed English actor Malcolm McDowell, who's perhaps most famous for his leading role in the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film "A Clockwork Orange." Meanwhile, his mother is Arkansas-born Academy Award-winning actress Mary Steenburgen.

However, a key difference between Lily and Charlie is that Lily was born in her father's native England, while Charlie was born in Los Angeles. That said, Lily is like her husband in that she speaks with an American accent. In a 2020 interview with Hello!, she explained that she used to have a British accent, but lost it after moving to California with her mother at a young age. "I was the new girl with a very sweet, strong but specific British accent," Lily said (via Today). "I was trying to say the names of my classmates, but I just pronounced vowels in a very different way and so I got made fun of." During an appearance on "The Kelly Clarkson Show" in 2022, Lily explained that she picked up an American accent by mimicking what she heard in movies.

While Lily and Charlie relocated to Denmark in 2023, the pair do still have a house in Los Angeles (per Architectural Digest). But as Lily explained to Vogue Scandinavia in August 2024, the home's interior is full of Scandinavian influences.