Lily Allen recalls being bullied for having 'poor hygiene' by an ex-partner
The Smile singer - who split from Stranger Things actor husband David Harbour in 2024, after four years of marriage - has revealed she faced "abuse" over her uncleanliness by a past boyfriend.
Without revealing their identity, she told friend Miquita Oliver on their Miss Me? podcast: 'It was somebody I was in a relationship with who would do it to me, and I don't think that it was real.
'I think that it was like a form of bullying and abuse, it was a horrible one.
'And as bullying forms of abuse go, it's a really horrible one.'
She continued: 'Yeah, it was like done on purpose to make me feel self-conscious and s*** about myself. And make them feel powerful.'
On a recent episode of the podcast, Lily admitted she "can't remember" how many abortions she's had.
The 40-year-old singer revealed during a conversation about birth control that she used to get pregnant "all the time".
Speaking about contraception, Lily shared: "I just remember I have an IUD [contraceptive coil] now.
"I think I'm on my third maybe fourth and I just remember before that it was a complete disaster area. Yeah, I'd get pregnant all the time."
She subsequently discussed her experience of abortions, admitting she can't remember how many she's actually had.
Singing to the tune of Frank Sinatra's My Way, she said: "Abortions I've had a few ... but then again ... I can't remember exactly how many."
Lily added: "I can't remember. I think maybe like, I want to say four or five."
The British star revealed that one of her ex-partners actually paid for her to get an abortion and, at the time, she considered it to be a "romantic" gesture.
She shared: "I remember once getting pregnant and the man paying for my abortion, and me thinking it was so romantic!"
Miquita then said: "I actually think that is romantic!"
However, Lily quickly rubbished that suggestion, observing that kids "are a lot more expensive".
The LDN hitmaker - who has daughters Ethel, 13, and Marnie, 11, with ex-husband Sam Cooper - said: "No, I don't think it's generous or romantic. Think about that investment, like that's how much is it ... 500 quid? Kids are a lot more expensive."
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Sydney Morning Herald
4 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘So cool': Stranger Things star finds his happy place among the Ochi
Having grown up on our screens as the golden-hearted schoolboy Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things, Finn Wolfhard is used to inhabiting an otherworldly has spent the past 10 years – almost half his life – heading off attacks from the alien forces of the Upside Down dimension. Mostly, he has confronted the unknown on greenscreen: blank sets where the work of computer animators will round out the action. 'They are amazing artists in their own way,' he says. 'But as an actor, you are reacting off nothing.' What attracted him to making fantasy film The Legend of Ochi, he says, was its hand-made quality. Isaiah Saxon's film, which is screening at MIFF, is also a fantasy about a clash between humans and bizarre creatures, but it is a very different beast. Most of it was shot on location. It is set in the Carpathian Mountains – Count Dracula's old haunt – where the villages, save for the occasional passing car, look very much as they always have, surrounded by mountains covered in thick forest. Here, the foolhardy explorer may encounter the Ochi, which are like large apes with an alien tweak. The smaller Ochi are played by puppets; the larger ones are actors in furry suits. 'I didn't want to go too far from nature,' says Saxon. 'I wanted the audience to see the Ochi as real animals living in a real place.' For Wolfhard, all this was fantastically old-school. 'I loved the idea of working with animatronics and puppets,' he says, speaking over Zoom along with German actress Helena Zengel, who plays the film's heroine, Yuri. The puppets, he says, required people to operate them; one person's entire job might be operating a key Ochi's ears. 'This was an opportunity to really have this kind of amazing experience which not a lot of people get to have these days,' says Wolfhard, who has been in our lounge rooms as Mike since he was 12, but is still only 22. 'There was a whole team of people piloting the Ochi. And there was something so cool about that because, as they were controlling the puppets, they were the real actors.' Zengel is 17, but her character is just emerging from childhood, torn between loyalty to her embittered father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and longing for her mother Dasha (Emily Watson), a mythic figure who left the family under an impenetrable cloud years before. Maxim regularly takes the local boys – his proxy sons, handed over by their fathers for Maxim to toughen up – out on raiding parties. They try to kill any Ochi they can find, then come home for a revivifying wrestle; it's a sort of genocidal version of Scouts. Wolfhard plays Petro, a hesitant orphan whom Maxim has taken into his home. Petro is repelled by this bloodlust but is too timid to say so; it is Yuri who is the good shot, keen to hold her own among the boys. Until, the day after one of these night raids, she finds a wounded baby Ochi in the woods. The little Ochi looks like a cross between Yoda and a bush baby. Miserable Yuri feels an immediate affinity for it; more remarkably, she discovers she can trill its musical language. She takes it home, bandages it, sings to it. Loading 'I wanted to centre a kid who felt that her ability to express herself had withered or died,' says Saxon. 'Yuri is shut down and her only outlet is listening to screaming black metal. Then she sees an animal that is an antidote to everything humans are: direct, intuitive, instinctual. What would happen to that kid if that Ochi energy was in her life?' As it happens – and happenstance proves unusually obliging here, even by the standards of fairytale – she rediscovers her mother, Dasha, now a shepherd high in the hills. You can't befriend an Ochi,' says Dasha. You shouldn't try. 'Look at what we did to wolves,' she spits. 'Turned them into lapdogs!' This is Saxon's first feature, but he has already carved out a significant career as an inspired music video director, working with artists including Björk and Grizzly Bear; Wolfhard, who recently released his first album, was drawn to the project initially because he was a fan of those clips. 'I have this discomfort with our reliance on language as the primary communication format as human,' Saxon says. The Ochi communicate by merging their emotions through their voices, which are produced by mixing a mockingbird's call and something called a throat whistle. Saxon discovered the throat whistle and its great exponent, Paul Manalatos, when he was trawling the internet. There was Manalatos, warbling into his webcam. Somehow, that's very much in the spirit of the film. Zengel started acting even earlier than Wolfhard. She was 10 years old when she was lauded as revelatory in the tough 2019 German drama System Crasher, about a frighteningly volatile ward of the state who is passed from one agency to another, all her carers soon admitting she is beyond them. 'I was super young, you know,' she says. 'Back then, obviously I had fun saying these bad words! It was a cool time; I was able to do anything that kids shouldn't do. But I understood what was going on, I understood the topic and I took it seriously.' Loading The Legend of Ochi, as a family movie culminating in a clutch of benign messages about tolerance, diversity and the environment, is ostensibly that film's polar opposite, but Zengel notes that it doesn't condescend to younger audiences. Very young children might have eyes only for the baby Ochi, but there is a darkness at the heart of the story that could provoke uncomfortable questions for viewers of any age. 'I think there are adults who might take life lessons from it,' she says. 'It has beautiful side stories that it tells and things that you can project on today's society and today's life. So I think it's a very complex film.' Wolfhard agrees. 'I loved the script for just that reason. That, yes, kids could watch it, but it wasn't explicitly for children. I think movies made for kids in the last 15 years really try to spoon-feed children and assume they can't take in more nuanced themes.' Think of a great movie for children: almost everyone goes straight for The Wizard of Oz. 'I watched that as a kid and there's a lot of scary stuff in that movie. But life is scary!' says Wolfhard. 'Oh yes! I was traumatised by The Wizard of Oz!' enthuses Zengel. 'I like when children even at a young age see films or talk about things that are more serious.' Obviously, the Ochi are standing in for all the real animals that have been hunted or crowded out by humans – wolves, whales, tigers – at the same time as pushing a plea for peaceful co-existence that children readily understand. Closer to home, however, is the film's frankness about families' failings. Loading When Yuri runs away, mad Maxim dons some armour that could date back to Vlad the Impaler, gathers his boys and prepares to run his daughter to ground with a rifle. Dafoe's Maxim is ultimately a pathetically vulnerable man, but he's dangerous with it; Emily Watson, as the bolter, is hardly a cosy mother figure. They compare poorly with Ochi parents, who enfold their young in their fur, singing. The film is also prepared to face the unhappiness of children. As someone who grew up in front of millions of people, Wolfhard has spoken with feeling about how he was unable to explain to anyone, including himself, that he was not enjoying his Stranger Things fame in the way that everyone around him assumed he was. 'When people ask a kid, 'Are you OK?' they'll say, 'yes'. And that means nothing,' he told Cosmopolitan. 'Kids don't want to disappoint anyone. They don't even know if they're OK.' All these kids are unhappy. In the great tradition of children's literature, however, they will find a way out through having their own adventures, away from adult meddling. And, in Yuri's case, with a secret furry friend.
The Age
4 hours ago
- The Age
MIFF 2025: Stranger Things star finds his happy place in The Legend of Ochi
, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Having grown up on our screens as the golden-hearted schoolboy Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things , Finn Wolfhard is used to inhabiting an otherworldly has spent the past 10 years – almost half his life – heading off attacks from the alien forces of the Upside Down dimension. Mostly, he has confronted the unknown on greenscreen: blank sets where the work of computer animators will round out the action. 'They are amazing artists in their own way,' he says. 'But as an actor, you are reacting off nothing.' What attracted him to making fantasy film The Legend of Ochi , he says, was its hand-made quality. Isaiah Saxon's film, which is screening at MIFF, is also a fantasy about a clash between humans and bizarre creatures, but it is a very different beast. Most of it was shot on location. It is set in the Carpathian Mountains – Count Dracula's old haunt – where the villages, save for the occasional passing car, look very much as they always have, surrounded by mountains covered in thick forest. Here, the foolhardy explorer may encounter the Ochi, which are like large apes with an alien tweak. The smaller Ochi are played by puppets; the larger ones are actors in furry suits. 'I didn't want to go too far from nature,' says Saxon. 'I wanted the audience to see the Ochi as real animals living in a real place.' Helena Zengel as Yuri, with her baby Ochi. Credit: Madman Films For Wolfhard, all this was fantastically old-school. 'I loved the idea of working with animatronics and puppets,' he says, speaking over Zoom along with German actress Helena Zengel, who plays the film's heroine, Yuri. The puppets, he says, required people to operate them; one person's entire job might be operating a key Ochi's ears. 'This was an opportunity to really have this kind of amazing experience which not a lot of people get to have these days,' says Wolfhard, who has been in our lounge rooms as Mike since he was 12, but is still only 22. 'There was a whole team of people piloting the Ochi. And there was something so cool about that because, as they were controlling the puppets, they were the real actors.' Zengel is 17, but her character is just emerging from childhood, torn between loyalty to her embittered father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and longing for her mother Dasha (Emily Watson), a mythic figure who left the family under an impenetrable cloud years before. Maxim regularly takes the local boys – his proxy sons, handed over by their fathers for Maxim to toughen up – out on raiding parties. They try to kill any Ochi they can find, then come home for a revivifying wrestle; it's a sort of genocidal version of Scouts. Finn Wolfhard with Willem Dafoe in The Legend of Ochi. Credit: Madman Films Wolfhard plays Petro, a hesitant orphan whom Maxim has taken into his home. Petro is repelled by this bloodlust but is too timid to say so; it is Yuri who is the good shot, keen to hold her own among the boys. Until, the day after one of these night raids, she finds a wounded baby Ochi in the woods. The little Ochi looks like a cross between Yoda and a bush baby. Miserable Yuri feels an immediate affinity for it; more remarkably, she discovers she can trill its musical language. She takes it home, bandages it, sings to it. Loading 'I wanted to centre a kid who felt that her ability to express herself had withered or died,' says Saxon. 'Yuri is shut down and her only outlet is listening to screaming black metal. Then she sees an animal that is an antidote to everything humans are: direct, intuitive, instinctual. What would happen to that kid if that Ochi energy was in her life?' As it happens – and happenstance proves unusually obliging here, even by the standards of fairytale – she rediscovers her mother, Dasha, now a shepherd high in the hills. You can't befriend an Ochi,' says Dasha. You shouldn't try. 'Look at what we did to wolves,' she spits. 'Turned them into lapdogs!' This is Saxon's first feature, but he has already carved out a significant career as an inspired music video director, working with artists including Björk and Grizzly Bear; Wolfhard, who recently released his first album, was drawn to the project initially because he was a fan of those clips. 'I have this discomfort with our reliance on language as the primary communication format as human,' Saxon says. The Ochi communicate by merging their emotions through their voices, which are produced by mixing a mockingbird's call and something called a throat whistle. Saxon discovered the throat whistle and its great exponent, Paul Manalatos, when he was trawling the internet. There was Manalatos, warbling into his webcam. Somehow, that's very much in the spirit of the film. The discovery of a wounded baby Ochi changes everything for Helena Zengel's Yuri. Credit: Madman Films Zengel started acting even earlier than Wolfhard. She was 10 years old when she was lauded as revelatory in the tough 2019 German drama System Crasher , about a frighteningly volatile ward of the state who is passed from one agency to another, all her carers soon admitting she is beyond them. 'I was super young, you know,' she says. 'Back then, obviously I had fun saying these bad words! It was a cool time; I was able to do anything that kids shouldn't do. But I understood what was going on, I understood the topic and I took it seriously.' Loading The Legend of Ochi , as a family movie culminating in a clutch of benign messages about tolerance, diversity and the environment, is ostensibly that film's polar opposite, but Zengel notes that it doesn't condescend to younger audiences. Very young children might have eyes only for the baby Ochi, but there is a darkness at the heart of the story that could provoke uncomfortable questions for viewers of any age. 'I think there are adults who might take life lessons from it,' she says. 'It has beautiful side stories that it tells and things that you can project on today's society and today's life. So I think it's a very complex film.' Wolfhard agrees. 'I loved the script for just that reason. That, yes, kids could watch it, but it wasn't explicitly for children. I think movies made for kids in the last 15 years really try to spoon-feed children and assume they can't take in more nuanced themes.' Think of a great movie for children: almost everyone goes straight for The Wizard of Oz . 'I watched that as a kid and there's a lot of scary stuff in that movie. But life is scary!' says Wolfhard. 'Oh yes! I was traumatised by The Wizard of Oz !' enthuses Zengel. 'I like when children even at a young age see films or talk about things that are more serious.' A mother Ochi leaves her human counterpart in the shade in The Legend of Ochi. Credit: Madman Films Obviously, the Ochi are standing in for all the real animals that have been hunted or crowded out by humans – wolves, whales, tigers – at the same time as pushing a plea for peaceful co-existence that children readily understand. Closer to home, however, is the film's frankness about families' failings. Loading When Yuri runs away, mad Maxim dons some armour that could date back to Vlad the Impaler, gathers his boys and prepares to run his daughter to ground with a rifle. Dafoe's Maxim is ultimately a pathetically vulnerable man, but he's dangerous with it; Emily Watson, as the bolter, is hardly a cosy mother figure. They compare poorly with Ochi parents, who enfold their young in their fur, singing.
7NEWS
15 hours ago
- 7NEWS
‘Gay for pay': Girlfriend of British man insists that him sleeping with men doesn't mean he's gay
A British woman who says that her straight boyfriend sleeps with men on camera has insisted that he's not gay and it's 'just work.' Terri and Ryan, from Cheshire in the UK, feature on a YouTube episode of 'Love Don't Judge,' where they share the secret moneymaking formula they've found in the world of adult entertainment. The pair both make spicy content for money and combine their skills to earn between $4,000 to $12,000 a month. While ex-convict Ryan stars in the X-rated scenes, his girlfriend Terri acts as director and camerawoman filming her boyfriend as he gets physical with other men. Terri started making content herself in 2021 and explains that through working in the adult entertainment industry she discovered that the most lucrative area of the industry was to focus on the LGBTQIA+ audience. 'When he was in prison, I was making content with other people in the industry and when I was talking to the lads about it they were saying they don't make much money from working with women, they make money from working with men,' she said. The couple insist that the sole reason they pursue making content where Ryan is intimate with other men is because it makes the most money. 'I don't feel any certain way about it, it's just work to both of us,' Terri said. Terri also makes content which involves her getting intimate with other women which she says gives her an understanding of what Ryan's doing for work. Despite its ability to bring in the cash, the couple's unconventional setup has shocked their family and left some viewers baffled. 'Friends wise, the ones I'm still mates with don't want to hear about it, they are not interested,' Ryan said. 'Family, the ones I speak to I think are alright about it but again, it doesn't really come up in conversation that much. 'I just say modelling, I'm doing modelling. People who do have a problem with it seem to do it online, not face to face anyways.' The episode also shows the couple sat down with Terri's mother, who questions their career path and the strength of their relationship. 'Aren't you worried that he'll leave you for a man?' she asks her daughter. Terri insists she trusts Ryan and that their relationship is rock solid, no matter what people say. As part of the episode the interviewer asks members of the public their thoughts on the couple's career choice and if they'd consider it. 'I guess I've got some old school traditions . . .I wouldn't like it,' one person said. 'I feel like I'd feel too awkward . . .it would kill the romance for me,' said another. 'it's just a bit odd isn't it, you can't be doing that,' a third added.
