Lily Cole: 'I never considered myself attractive before I was a model'

“I obviously want to spend more time with Wylde, so I have less time to give to work,” explains Cole, whose long red hair, cornflower blue eyes and alabaster skin, twinned with a startling IQ, have long-prevented her from being pigeon-holed. “It has made me much more focused and given me this realisation of what wasn’t making me happy. It was why I made the decision to focus on creative stuff like acting again.”

She adds: “I always knew I wanted a child. It is just wonderful. It has added something to my life. It is very grounding.”

Cole’s partner and Wylde’s father is Portuguese tech entrepreneur Kwame Ferreira, ten years her senior, who styles himself online as: “Helicopter pilot, veggie barbecue enthusiast and occasional social anthropologist with an appetite for mid sixteen century Nepalese painting and boats”. 

The pair met while building Impossible - the afore-mentioned social network that encourages users to offer "gifts" - from a tour of a city to home-baked bread - without any expectation of return, and is supported by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, Chelsea Clinton and Tom Uglow from Google’s Creative Lab. 

Cole announced her pregnancy on the site in 2015, writing “The first known impossible baby is being born”. The family live together in London, but being a full-time, stay-at-home mum is one role Cole isn’t ready to give a go, just yet.

We meet in the basement bar of Trafalgar Studios in London, the theatre hosting her 16-week run of Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist, directed by another polymath: actor-director-writer, Simon Callow.

Starring Simon Bird (The Inbetweeners) and Charlotte Ritchie (Call the Midwife, Fresh Meat) the play is a clever riff on Molière’s seventeenth century comedy of manners, The Misanthrope, set in an Oxbridge-esque university town and focusing on 24 hours in the lives of a morally bankrupt group of young academics over the course of a dinner party. Cole plays Araminta, a seductress with an alarming past. 

Its overarching theme is how self-obsessed, conceited and hilariously hypocritical the social elite can be; particularly pertinent, perhaps, in today’s political climate. Outside their ivory towers the world is being brought to its knees, yet their conversation consistently reverts to themselves.

As a Cambridge alumna, Cole speaks from experience: “I really felt this at university; you can talk so much about the problems of the world and go through loads of political and philosophical theories, but there is such a disconnect between the conversation and then actually engaging and changing things.

“You get a lot of people who are well intentioned and very intelligent and politically motivated, but it felt like it was in a bubble.”

Cole twice deferred entry to university to concentrate on acting and star alongside Heath Ledger in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus; during breaks in revision for finals she moonlighted on Dr Who. “Sometimes I am like how the f*** did I do that, let alone why?” she says. “I cram. I worked really hard. I was very focused when I need to be.”

Does she put herself under unecessary pressure? “I am ambitious on myself, if that makes sense. I’m hard on myself. It’s not so much for other people - like parents or anything - it’s for myself, which I don’t think is a very healthy thing. You can be too hard on yourself.”  

She is, she says, working on it. But there were times when she questioned whether she would even finish her degree. Slightly older than the other undergraduates, with a blossoming screen career, college was hardly the centre of her universe.

“I saw it very much as an opportunity to learn and spent the bare minimum [of] time there to achieve that. I had a parallel life, whereas most students are really invested in being there.”

Despite her fierce intelligence, acting was always going to be her end game. Born in Torquay, Cole and her sister, Eveline were brought up in London by their artist mother, Patience. Her father, Chris, a boat builder, left when she young. She would put on performances, singing and dancing at home. Principled from a young age, she gave up eating meat at 10 when she realised “animals had to die for it”.

Her modelling career came by happenstance: she was scouted by Storm model agency at a Soho burger bar, when she was just 14. It was, she says, “nice and flattering” but at the time she didn’t even follow fashion, let alone read glossy magazines. Securing a Vogue cover, two years later, was when life really got “pretty surreal”.

“It all happened quite quickly. It felt quite magical. And I was really interested in travelling and I was always curious about meeting other creative people.”

She attended St Marylebone School before going to Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith for sixth form, where she acheived straight As. In the past, she has spoken about being bullied for her hair colour. Today, she is more guarded, referring only to having had “trouble” at school. Either way, her modelling success shut down any nagging self-doubts.

“It was very confidence building because I was being validated in a way that I hadn’t been before. I hadn’t considered myself attractive before and suddenly I was being told I was.”

With a sensible head on her shoulders, Cole ensured she didn’t go down the “slippery slope” of getting “too obsessed” with her weight, but admits that “it certainly did add a pressure. The reality is you are putting on clothes that are tiny and you have to fit into them.” It is an industry she would like to see better regulated with proper “protection and standards in place for managing models”.

Cole has faced some criticism, herself, for receiving £200,000 of taxpayers’ money from the Cabinet Office’s Innovation in Giving fund to launch Impossible, but then failing to break even. Now under the watchful eye of Ferreira and diversifying with an online shop, magazine and innovation agency, Cole says the platform is finally “covering itself”.

Her next challenge is as one of the judges for the Kindle Storyteller Awards, open to anyone who publishes through Kindle Direct Publishing, via Amazon. The prize is £20,000 and Cole is looking for anything that “speaks to [her] most”. As someone who read each of the party manifestos in full before voting in the last election, and had her undergraduate thesis, <Impossible Utopias> published as a book, this sounds like a tall order.

“It’s the ability to connect with characters, empathise,” she says. “It is all quite subtle - it either works or it doesn’t.” Which, when you consider all the things she's tried herself, could be her motto for life.

Lily Cole is on the judging panel of the Kindle Storyteller Award 2017, a £20,000 literary prize recognising new work submitted using Kindle Direct Publishing. Entries close 19th May.  

For more information, visit:  amazon.co.uk/storyteller