Lily McInerny listens. Her Cécile in Bonjour Tristesse notices everything on the terrace and wants almost nothing, and that stillness is both the reason to cast her and the reason the film around her never turns dangerous.
Fi1m perspective
The thing McInerny does is watch. In Bonjour Tristesse (2025) her Cécile spends a summer above the water with a father who treats life as a holiday, his temporary girlfriend, a boy with a boat, and then Anne, the old friend of her dead mother who rearranges the house by walking into it. McInerny takes all of it in without seeming to move. She notices beautifully, and then, as we said at the time, she goes for a swim.
She has not been doing this long. She acted as a child, trained at LaGuardia in New York, and arrived properly in 2022 with a lead in Jamie Dack's Palm Trees and Power Lines, playing Lea, a teenager, in a film that made her name among people who watch small American films closely. The same year brought two episodes of Tell Me Lies as Macy and a New York stage debut in Camp Siegfried. Then Durga Chew-Bose gave her Cécile, and Alexandra Pechman's first feature, Magazine (2026), gives her Nora, in the New York literary world of the 2010s. Nearly all of it is girls at a turning point, and much of it is directed by women, which she says she did not seek out.
What works is the quiet. McInerny does not act at the camera; she lets a thought cross her face and trusts us to catch it, and in scenes of vulnerability that is worth a great deal. What does not work, yet, is threat. Sagan's Cécile is clever, spoilt and frightened, and the plot needs that fear to curdle. We liked McInerny's Cécile from her first scene and never once worried about what she might do, and that is a problem in a story that is supposed to end with her having done something. Some of that is Chew-Bose's script, which gives the girl observations rather than wants. Some of it is McInerny, who is watchful and likeable and, on this evidence, has not yet found the gear where watching becomes plotting.
She is still very early. The talent for internal detail is real, and it is rarer than the talent for noise. The next director to cast her would do well to give her a character who wants something badly enough to be unpleasant about it, and then get out of the way.
Biography
Lily McInerny is an American actress. She was born on 13 December 1998 in New York City and attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.
McInerny made her feature film debut in Palm Trees and Power Lines (2022) as Lea, for which she received a nomination for Best Breakthrough Performance at the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards. She appeared as Macy in the series Tell Me Lies (2022) and starred as Cécile in the film Bonjour Tristesse (2024). She has also performed in theatre, including the 2022 Off-Broadway production of Camp Siegfried.
