Sunday with Lily Cole: ‘I like a tidy house, but I don’t own an iron’

Actor Lily Cole on mending crockery and eating noodles

Lie-in or up early? I love a lie-in, especially on Sundays. I’ll sleep in as long as my daughter [seven-year-old Wylde] will let me, then get up and feed the cat.

Sunday brekkie? Ideally, avocado and eggs on toast. Realistically, chocolate granola with oat milk. We live in a flat in Lisbon, so we eat out on the terrace.

Sunday mornings? We usually tinker with creative things. We’re both into our painting and have a big white wall in the flat that we paint on that’s fun.

Sunday outing? Often we head out of the city. There’s nature 40 minutes in most directions from Lisbon, so we might go to Sintra beach or to the Abegoaria mountains for a hike.

Where do you eat? I’m not big into the classic British Sunday lunch. It doesn’t have any sanctity here, so I’ll focus on how I want to spend the day as opposed to where I want to have lunch.

What do you miss most from home? Marmite!

Sundays growing up? I remember a teacher at Sunday school getting us to open a banana and squeeze all the toothpaste out of a tube so we could put the banana and the paste back, which obviously we couldn’t. The moral: be careful what you say because it’s hard to take things back, which I have mixed feelings about. It’s good advice, but also repressive and puritanical.

Sunday housework? I like a tidy house, but I don’t own an iron.

Sunday evenings? Maybe we watch a film on the projector in the living room. I look for films that hit the sweet spot of entertaining for both my daughter and me as an adult. I think I’ve rinsed every single Studio Ghibli film on that basis.

Sunday dinner? Usually miso soup or noodles. I like Asian and Japanese food.

Sunday wind down? I’ve recently got into kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending things. A lot of my crockery broke when we moved from England – I’m slowly trying to fix that.

Hilma, Lily Cole’s new film, is in cinemas from 28 October, and available to stream on Viaplay UK in 2023


Contributor

Rich Pelley

The GuardianTramp

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