Lily Collins' new drama will be a personal one for her.
Collins' upcoming movie To The Bone is the directorial debut of unREAL co-creator Marti Noxon, who wrote the script based on her battle with an eating disorder. Collins, who plays a woman struggling with anorexia, told The Hollywood Reporter that she connected with both Noxon and the film due to her experiences with eating disorders.
"[Eating disorders were] something that I went through as a teenager and had never spoken about," the Golden Globe nominee told THR. "I thought this would be an amazing way for me to almost face a fear, and to... open up a conversation among young girls and guys."
It wouldn't be the first time Noxon's work sparked a conversation about mental illness. In her series unREAL, TV producer Rachel (Shiri Appleby) struggles to manage her undefined mental illness while performing at her high-stress job.
While unREAL deals with weighty issues, its tone was never too dire, and it sounds like To The Bone will have the same dark humor that unREAL incorporates.
Collins told THR, "I feel that the way it was written and told are really only ways that it could be told by someone who had actually gone through it themselves because there is a sense of weird humor we use... It doesn't make it too, for a lack of a better word, weighty."
To The Bone will have its world premiere at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.
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