Teddie Allen. CREDIT: Rachel Louise Brown
T eddie Allen had never really been recognised in public before last year’s Glastonbury Festival . She’s used to bumping into people she knows at Worthy Farm because she’s been going since she was a kid – her dad, the famously charismatic actor Keith Allen, loves the festival so much that he once directed a play about it.
But this time, some of the people approaching her were fans, not friends, because the first season of MobLand had premiered a few months earlier.
Teddie, the younger half-sister of singer Lily Allen and prolific actor Alfie Allen ( Game of Thrones , John Wick ), appears in the splashy gangster drama alongside Tom Hardy , Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan . Though her role in the first season was a supporting one, she made a strong impression.
“People would come up to me and I’d think that I knew them,” Allen recalls with a cringe. “But they were just like, ‘I love the show.'” Fortunately, Allen’s friends would step in to decline selfie requests if she happened to be “quite drunk because it was late in the day”.
It must have been a discombobulating experience for Allen, who was just 19 at the time, but she adjusted fast and can now see the irony in her newfound visibility. “I remember growing up [and] being quite an insecure person. I would be like, ‘Mum, I feel like everyone’s looking at me,’ and she’d be like, ‘No, don’t be ridiculous,'” Allen says. “But she can’t say that anymore because sometimes they are!”
It feels pedantic to point it out, but Allen will probably be recognised a lot more once season two of MobLand premieres on Paramount+ later this month. Her character Gina Da Souza, the teenage daughter of scrappy mafia fixer Harry (Hardy) and his exasperated wife Jan (Joanne Froggatt), has a much more prominent role in the new episodes.
Allen is brilliant at conveying Gina’s confidence and competence as she builds her own criminal operation, away from her father’s chaos, while hinting at the pain beneath her inscrutable surface.
“I just think she comes into herself so much more,” Allen says when we meet at a buzzy brasserie near her West London flat. As it happens, it’s the same spot where NME interviewed her sister Lily back in 2018.
Though this is Teddie’s first-ever profile interview, she arrives alone without a publicist for moral support and proceeds to chat openly over a pot of Earl Grey for well over the allotted interview time. She’s good fun and can laugh at the sometimes absurd press coverage that comes with being an Allen.
When she attended a TV premiere in February, one gossip site described her as “Lily Allen’s rarely-seen sister” – shameless clickbait. “I was like: ‘Excuse me, I go outside all the time!'” she says with a chuckle.
And when the first season of MobLand aired last year, a different gossip site repurposed old quotes from a joint interview that Allen had given with her father Keith. “[The gist] was: ‘nepo baby discovered’,” she recalls.
“I was like, guys, I’ve been here on the internet literally the whole time!”
“In MobLand , I have to say things like, ‘You fucking c**t!’ Helen Mirren tells me to get on with it…”
Anyway, back to Gina, who has bigger issues to deal with than the odd dodgy headline. “You get beyond that angsty teenage thing she’s got going on in the first season,” Allen says.
“[The new season] delves more into the actual complexities of her relationship with her dad, and a lot of that comes because she wants his love.” Gina is so fed up with both her parents that she’s fled the family home and is living in Hackney with her boyfriend, Eddie Harrigan (Anson Boon).
He, of course, is the grandson of Harry’s ruthless mafioso employers Conrad and Maeve Harrigan (Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren). The young couple are making their own way by extorting money from unsuspecting YouTubers, but Eddie admits that Gina is the real brains of the operation.
When Maeve instructs her grandson to dump Gina, whom she describes in classic MobLand fashion as a “little whore”, it’s a sure sign that Allen’s character is seen as a threat – or at least a dangerous distraction for Eddie.
Though Gina is clearly furious at her father, whom Allen says has made her feel “boxed into” a life on London’s criminal fringes, she’s also a chip off the old block. “Obviously, through the years she’s learned all this stuff, maybe even subconsciously from watching her dad… and being around the Harrigans,” Allen says. “And so she’s like, ‘Why shouldn’t I use it?’ And she’s good at it – really good at it.”
Allen is now used to going toe-to-toe with the show’s illustrious cast, which also includes Paddy Considine, Toby Jones and two-time Oscar nominee Janet McTeer, but some of her season one scenes with Hardy and Mirren were a shock to the system. “The script is so vulgar and you’re usually so in their face, [saying things] like ‘you fucking cunt!'” Allen notes.
She isn’t exaggerating. As you’d expect from a series produced and directed in part by Guy Ritchie , MobLand is never afraid to investigate the saltier corners of the English language.
“I remember being like, ‘I don’t know if I can say this’, but [Mirren] was like, ‘Just get on with it, it’s fine,'” Allen continues. “And then her character’s like, ‘I’ll kill you, you little bitch’ – but as soon as the camera cuts, it’s all just normal [again].”
W hen Allen was cast in MobLand shortly before the first season started shooting in November 2024, she was working in a restaurant. Initially, her role was supposed to be “very small”, so she commuted to the show’s outer London set from Stroud in Gloucestershire, the leafy country town where she grew up.
She also hid the fact she was nursing a broken ankle in case it cost her the job. “I kept taking the [protective] boot off to go into work,” she recalls.
“I would be limping around, and people would be like, ‘You alright?'”
This slight subterfuge paid off when Gina was gradually written into more scenes. Today, Allen says MobLand feels like her biggest role to date, especially now that Gina is more integral – but she wasn’t a novice beforehand.
As a child actor, she appeared in 2015’s Cider With Rosie – a TV movie based on Laurie Lee’s beloved memoir – and the 2016 film adaptation of Arthur Ransome’s classic novel Swallows And Amazons . But then, aside from another film appearance in the fantasy adventure Four Kids And It , which she shot in 2018, Allen parked her acting ambitions until she was approaching adulthood.
“I didn’t enjoy it. I think I thought I would,” Allen says of her first forays into acting.
Though the brasserie is getting busier and noisier as lunchtime approaches, she doesn’t swerve this more serious portion of our conversation. “I think being away from home with a chaperone… while being quite an anxious child, was not the best experience in terms of a little developing brain,” Allen says.
“I was like, ‘I don’t want to be in those high-pressure environments. I just want to go to school and do normal job things.'”
“My parents never minded either way if I became an actor”
Acting is very much in Allen’s blood: her famous father Keith has amassed nearly 150 film and TV credits, while her mother Tamzin Malleson is also a successful actor who has appeared in British TV staples such as Midsomer Murders and Unforgotten . Allen says her “parents never minded either way” if she followed in their footsteps, so she “kind of put [her acting career] to sleep” for much of her adolescence.
What reawakened her interest was the possibility of a brief teenage escape from Stroud, which she describes as “a small town where everyone knows everything about you.” So, at 17, Allen took a job in Norway in the fourth season of icy crime drama Wisting – and enjoyed it so much that she decided to return to acting. When she landed another decent TV role in last year’s Malice , playing a member of an ultra-wealthy family being targeted by Jack Whitehall’s Machiavellian manny, she felt ready to drop out of sixth form for good.
Did she ever ask her parents for advice? “I mean, I talk to my mum sometimes about scripts if I have an audition,” Allen says.
“I think when I was younger, I was worried about the fame [aspect] but I was aware that I could always speak to them or Lily if it did get to a point where I felt really freaked out by it. But I think I thought I would be more freaked out about it [than I have been].” So far, even with occasional clickbait to contend with, Allen says she’s taking it “all in my stride”.
The future certainly looks bright. MobLand has just been renewed for a third season – something Allen said “we’d love to do” during this interview, which took place shortly before the announcement.
And in the meantime, we’ll see her opposite J.K. Simmons and Felicity Jones in The Thing That Hurts , an upcoming film that she shot in Brussels.
She’s playing a “troubled teenage girl who’s very different from Gina” in a story she describes as “bittersweet”.
So, what kind of role is she eyeing next? “I’d like to do more indie stuff, but then that’s what every actor says,” she says with a self-deprecating eye roll.
“And I’d be interested in playing with horror: a cool gothic horror. But I just want to do as much as possible.” As a child actor, Allen “hated” watching herself on screen but now she finds fulfilment in every part of the process.
“I think getting older, you just kind of let go of that – and it’s freeing,” she says. “Even though it is a serious environment [on set], you can definitely play around more.
And you get to meet so many great people, especially on a show like MobLand .”
‘MobLand’ season two debuts 18 September on Paramount+
All Teddie Allen photography is by Rachel Louise Brown
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