Lily Allen Reveals Details of Her Turbulent Open Marriage to David Harbour

Lily Allen, 40, shared candid details about her turbulent open marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour.

“It’s not something that I think I would necessarily explore again,” Allen told Elle UK. The British singer married Harbour, 50, in 2020.

The couple met in 2019 and entered into a monogamous relationship. Eventually, Allen says, Harbour suggested that the two start seeing other people—an arrangement she was not interested in.

“[Open relationships are] really f---ing prevalent, and for some people it’s really enjoyable and exciting, and for other people it’s not,” Allen said. “I have a lot of queer friends, and when my relationship started to change my gay friends in New York
said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know straight people were doing this!’ I was like, ‘Neither did I!’”

The pair announced their separation in February 2025—a headline-making breakup, to be sure, but nothing comparable to the firestorm that followed the release of Allen’s tell-all album, West End Girl, in October 2025.

In “Madeline,” she sings about the ground rules set by a couple—presumably Allen and Harbour—in an open relationship: “We had an arrangement / Be discreet and don’t be blatant / There had to be payment / It had to be with strangers.”

In the same song, Allen suggests that one partner broke the rules by sleeping with someone he knew: “But you’re not a stranger, Madeline,” she sings.

Since the album’s release, a costume designer named Natalie Tippett claimed that the song was about her. Tippett worked on the 2023 film We Have a Ghost, in which Harbour plays a spirit named Ernest.

The album was Allen’s fifth, following a seven-year break to focus on her two daughters, Ethel, 14, and Marnie, 13. She shares the two children with her ex-husband, builder Sam Cooper, to whom she was married from 2011 to 2018.

The parents of her children’s friends reacted positively to her highly publicized musical catharsis.

“They were there when I was in a really tough spot—they could see how drawn I was and how withdrawn I became and how skinny I got and how sad I was,“ she recalled. “They’d come and pick up their kids from play dates and I wouldn’t come downstairs. I’d be in my bedroom crying. And so I think this album came out and they’re all happy for me.”

Now, she has moved forward from the tumultuous relationship. “I feel liberated,” she told Elle. “I’m genuinely psyched and excited for the next couple of years.”