+ Cousin of Eva Luton "Evy" is tattooed on her hand in honor of her.
+ Currently has 12 tattoos.
+ Cheated on her ex-Desmund Rowe (the Edward to her Bella) with a producer. Media made a big fucking deal about it.
+ Does not have a permanent address currently. Bounces around hotels.
+ Avid stoner, occasionally dabbles with other assored drugs
+ Won BAFTA Rising Star Award in 2010
+ Proudly displays her Razzie next to her Cesar
+ Publicly discussed her battle with anorexia during the final Breaking Dawn press tour
+ Obsessed with all things tarot card, psychic, and crystals
Having a public figure for a father wasn't really something Lila ever gave a whole lot of thought about until the first time she disagreed with his stance on a political matter. Dad was in a position to make great change, and instead, dad was a selfish prick. Josh O'Connor thought little of daughter's democratic bleeding heart until she became a public figure. The one thing the two could agree on was to distance themselves from one another as much as possible.
Lila's mother died from a cancerous brain tumor when she was twelve, and the repercussions of that echoed throughout her teenage years. Acting had been a love of her mother's life, and given what a strained relationship Lila had with her father, it was the one thing she took up to help fill the void. Except, Lila didn't exactly start off with the sort of success she would later end up with.
After her mother's death, her father found he could gain more political ground if they moved to Huntington Beach, California. While he found what he wanted, Lila struggled to fit in. She wasn't classically trained, she didn't know what the fucking being method was, and she certainly didn't know the first thing about casting directors or Hollywood hierarchies. Lila failed to land roles in high school plays, and opted instead to do art department work with a couple other burners, while other girls lived out fantasies on the stage.
Acting required an aggression, a hustle, and a passion that she simply didn't have. Smoking weed with her friends, pissing off her dad, and breaking boys' hearts had a much greater appeal. It was more or less a combination of the three that actually got her the career she never thought she'd obtain.
Lila convinced a boy in her first period class to skip with her, drive to LA, get high and hit up a human rights rally. She easily suckered him into it, and once they arrived, she ditched him. In an effort to escape him, she darted off past a few distracted bodyguards and ended up in the backstage area where Sean Penn was getting ready to speak. He mistakenly took her for one of the volunteers, and she played along. The two got to talking, and it wasn't until he was about to go on stage when one of the organizers asked who she was. Impressed by her gutso, Penn had her stick around. She watched from the sidelines and tagged along to the next event. It was easy to get swept up in the excitement of the day, and for most of it, Lila thought she was going to go home with not just a great story, but maybe this was what she was meant to be doing with her life?
With hindsight, Lila now jokes that Sean Penn is the reason she's not saving the world. Because a couple days after the rally, Lila was contacted by the casting director of, "Into the Wild" and was brought in to read for a small part in the film.
Whether or not Lila would be in the movie seemed pretty uncertain at first. She was seventeen, her father wasn't exactly team!Sean Penn and it meant pulling her out of school. The two were in a no holds barred showdown for three straight days before he finally caved. And the rest, as they say is history.
Well, sort of. On set she easily bonded with Emile Hirsch, who just so happened to have a director friend of his swing by, Catherine Hardwicke.
There was nothing about doing Twilight which interested Lila. Vampires that sparkled in the sun was the sort of thing she hate watched after smoking a couple bowls. Catherine was compelling though, and the money was the sort of thing that would granted her the independence she so desperately longed for. College wouldn't be hard to give up, Lila wasn't exactly an A student, and the last thing she cared to hear about was how she was going to play such a nitwit in a movie that would surely tank.
So the decision was made and everything worked out perfectly. Okay, so there was the backlash from the internet, the "who the fuck is this girl", and then one day that evolved into absolute Beatles Mania.
Zero to six hundred fame was not something Lila entirely knew how to handle. At first she was lost in a sea of camera flashes and awkward answers. Then there was the period of time where she could only talk in sound bites. Followed by the end of the Twilight phase where she said fuck it all, and just presented her messy self to the public. During this time she was often photographed stumbling out of bars and wrongly labeled "a party girl." Lila has never been the type of wild party girl she likes to sometimes pretend she is. The world just opened to her and she was too naive to know not to enter through certain doors.
By the time the "Twilight" phrase of her life came to an end, she wasn't exactly sure how much she wanted to continue working as an actress. The world had tried to eat her up and swallow her whole. Lila pared down on her "team" and only kept a loyal two. No more franchises, no more shitty material, if the script wasn't worth while, Lila no longer cared. If that meant not working ever again, that's what it meant.
Only that's not what it meant, and in fact, Lila found herself rising from the ashes of a shitty franchise and evolving into the actress her mother always longed to be. Only now, it was what she wanted too.
