Lily Allen Defends ‘Nepo Babies’, Says They Have Feelings Too

December 21, 2022

Lily Allen has made an interesting PR move and leapt to the defence of “nepo babies” in a series of tweets this week.

In case you’ve spent 2022 mostly off the internet, “nepo babies” is the term given to public figures that have very famous parents – or other generally powerful connections – and so have a much easier time achieving success. Think of people like Dakota Johnson (whose parents are Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, and whose grandmother was Tippi Hedren), Zoe Kravitz (daughter of Lenny), and Maya Hawke (daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman).

Lily Allen: ‘Not Fair’

It’s become such a ubiquitous term this year that NY Mag recently published an extensive cover story on the subject. It naturally sparked a lot of discourse online, and today Allen – daughter of Trainspotting actor Keith Allen and film producer Alison Owen – decided to weigh in.

“The nepo babies y’all should be worrying about are the ones working for legal firms, the ones working for banks, and the ones working in politics. If we’re talking about real world consequences and robbing people of opportunity,” Allen wrote on Twitter. In a follow up tweet she said, “And before you come at me for being a nepo baby myself, I will be the first to tell you that I literally deserve nothing.”

The comments didn’t go down too well, leading Allen to post a more extensive thread on the whole situation, admitting that she has definitely had “a privileged upbringing… [and] that has created so many opportunities for me.”

She noted that in her early twenties she would have been very defensive around the topic of privilege, as “I felt like I worked extremely hard and that I deserved the success that I had”. She goes on to say that there is a severe lack of representation across the industry in regard to race and class, and there needs to be a wider conversation about wealth inequality.

“I do feel that nepo babies are being somewhat scapegoated here though,” she wrote. “There is a wider, societal conversation to be had about wealth inequality, about lack of programs and funding, and I guess that was the point I was trying to make, maybe badly.

“I promise you I’m not rooting for an industry full of people that had childhoods that looked like mine. I just really think that we can’t get to a real solution without identifying the real problem, as fun as it is to laugh at the kids of famous people. Nepo babies have feelings.”