Lily-Rose Depp strips in new sex TV show, The Idol – and reveals why she doesn’t want to be defined by her dad
SHE may have grown up in the shadow of her famous parents, but Lily-Rose Depp is no shrinking violet.
The 24-year-old daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis was in the eye of a storm last week over a racy TV drama which features her getting naked and performing sex acts.
New Sky Atlantic mini-series The Idol, which follows a pop star’s romance with a cult leader, was slammed as “sexist, pseudo-porn” by critics at the Cannes Film Festival.
Lily-Rose turned up the temperature further by indulging in a very public display of affection with her girlfriend rapper 070 Shake, greeting her at the airport in Los Angeles with a passionate kiss.
It was a typical move from the outspoken model-turned-actress, who is emerging as a hot new talent.
Whether she is speaking about her sexual fluidity, her anorexia battle or hitting back at being branded a nepo baby, Lily-Rose never holds back.
Neither is she one to hide her love life behind closed doors — being snapped in a series of steamy clinches with exes, including actors Austin Butler and Timothee Chalamet.
‘Everyone labelled me as gay’
But she refuses to speak about her private life in interviews, saying her upbringing around an A-list actor and a French superstar singer taught her “privacy is important”.
Lily-Rose — sister to Jack, who is three years younger — opened up about fame, telling Elle magazine: “My parents protected my brother and me from it as much as possible.
“I know my childhood didn’t look like everybody’s childhood but it’s also the only thing that I know.”
She hit the headlines age seven when she was hospitalised in the UK after contracting a life-threatening E-Coli infection.
At a fundraising event in 2020, Pirates Of The Caribbean star Johnny said: “I lived in the hospital for three weeks with my kid, not knowing if she was going to make it or not.”
Raised in France and LA, she landed a modelling contract with Karl Lagerfeld at 15 and became the face of Chanel a year later.
But she battled anorexia and has since hit out at social media trolls who commented on her weight.
She said: “It hurts a lot and depresses me.
“I have battled an eating disorder for a long time and am very proud of the results that I have achieved.”
The subject of Lily-Rose’s sexuality also hit the headlines when, at the age of 16, she posed for photographer iO Tillett Wright, for a project called Self Evident Truths, described as “a document of 10,000 people in the USA that identify as anything other than 100% straight.”
But she later complained that after she took part in the project, “everyone labelled me as gay”.
She told Nylon magazine: “That’s not what I was trying to say. I did that literally just to say you don’t have to label yourself, and then everyone was like, ‘Lily-Rose Depp comes out as gay.’”
Dad Johnny, who split from Vanessa when his daughter was 13, said her gender fluidity did not surprise him.
He said: “I already knew because she tells me everything — she’s not afraid to say anything to me. We’re super-tight and I’m very proud of our relationship.
“Lily’s really together. She’s a sharp kid and one of the smartest human beings I have ever met.”
While her dad’s abusive marriage with actress Amber Heard has been played out in the courts, Lily-Rose has had a few high-profile romances of her own.
She dated Timothee Chalamet for two years after they met on the set of Netflix’s historical drama The King in 2018, and put on a very passionate display on a yacht during a trip to Italy the following summer before they split in April 2020.
The star then got Elvis actor Austin Butler All Shook Up and sparked rumours of a romance in 2021 when they were spotted kissing in the street after a night out in London, but the relationship seems to have fizzled out quickly.
She moved on to French rapper Yassine Stein, who she dated for around a year, frequently kissing and cuddling in public.
While the actress hasn’t talked about her romances with men, she was happy to go public with her new love 070 Shake, who she began dating in January.
Earlier this month she confirmed rumours they were a couple by posting an Instagram picture of herself kissing the New Yorker — real name Danielle Balbuena — with the words: “4 MONTHS WITH MY CRUSH.”
And she made sure her girlfriend knew just how much she had missed her when she returned to LA from Cannes this weekend, going straight into a passionate kiss on the street.
Recently, Lily-Rose complained that her romances with A-list actors and her relationship with her dad had overshadowed her acting work.
She said: “I feel like for a lot of my career, people have really wanted to define me by the men in my life, whether that’s my family members or my boyfriends.”
Lily-Rose — who got her acting break at 15 in 2014 horror-comedy Tusk, which starred her dad — also hit out at being called a “nepo baby”.
She said: “People are going to have preconceived ideas about you or how you got there.
“I can definitely say that nothing is going to get you the part except for being right for the part.
“The internet cares a lot more about who your family is than the people who are casting you in things.
“Maybe you get your foot in the door, but you still just have your foot in the door. There’s a lot of work that comes after that.
“If somebody’s mum or dad is a doctor, and then the kid becomes a doctor, you’re not going to be like, ‘Well, you’re only a doctor because your parent is a doctor.’
“It’s like, ‘No, I went to medical school and trained.’”
‘The sleaziest love story in all of Hollywood’
While she continues to model, Lily-Rose’s acting career has gone from strength to strength in recent years with roles in 2016 drama Planetarium opposite Natalie Portman, and 2019’s The King, which was produced by Brad Pitt.
As Jocelyn in The Idol, she plays a pop icon who is attempting to recover her career after a nervous breakdown, which allows Lily-Rose to showcase the singing and acting talents she inherited from her parents.
Euphoria creator Sam Levinson wrote the series with Blinding Lights hitmaker The Weeknd, who earlier this month said he would be reverting to his birth name of Abel Tesfaye.
Levinson described Lily-Rose’s audition for him as “sensational”, adding: “She’s also just one of the best collaborators you could wish for.
“She can act, she can sing, and her and Abel’s chemistry is off the charts.”
But the project, which she billed on her Instagram as “the sleaziest love story in all of Hollywood”, has been embroiled in controversy.
In the series, Lily-Rose pleasures herself with ice cubes and appears in a picture where she apparently has semen on her face.
Insiders told Rolling Stone magazine the show was almost completely reshot to give it less of a feminine perspective after Tesfaye demanded more focus on his character.
Pet Sematary actress Amy Seimetz was said to have directed around 80 per cent of the scenes, and her departure resulted in Levinson stepping in to take over as director.
It’s claimed the raunchy rewrite has so many sex scenes that one source called it “sexual torture porn”.
The series, which begins on Monday on Sky Atlantic, was widely slammed when it debuted in Cannes last week.
The New York Times dismissed the show as “a Pornhub-homepage odyssey” starring “Lily-Rose Depp’s areolas,” while entertainment news website The Wrap branded it “luxury sleaze” — and a reporter from showbiz bible Variety tweeted: “I don’t need to see any more of Lily-Rose Depp naked.”
But the star defended the nudity, saying: “I think the occasional bareness of the character physically mirrors the bareness that we get to see emotionally in her and that’s something I felt was really important.”
And Sharon Stone, whose infamous leg-crossing scene in Basic Instinct caused a sensation three decades ago, praised the project as “sure-footed”.
In a tweet, she said the show “addresses the root of the crisis in entertainment: Which comes first, the brilliance or the heartache?”
With upcoming leads in The Governesses — a movie adaptation of novelist Anne Serre’s erotic fairytale — and a remake of gothic classic Nosferatu opposite Bill Skarsgård, we’re set to see a lot more of Lily-Rose Depp in the future.
And as the storm rages over The Idol, the actress remains characteristically defiant.
She said: “I’m not interested in making anything puritanical.
“I’m not interested in making anything that doesn’t challenge me or challenge other people.
“I think this show is fearless, and that’s something that I’ve been really excited and proud to dive into.”
