The sordid saga of Lily Allen and David Harbour’s marriage

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By Liam Kelly

October 27, 2025 — 9.47am

David Harbour answers the door of his New York townhouse and the colour immediately drains from his face. Flanked by his wife, Lily Allen, the Stranger Things star looks as though a former lover has popped by unannounced.

He takes a step forward in an attempt to confront this interloper out of earshot. “Oh God. What the hell are you doing here? I mean, last time I was single and I was living on the Lower East [Side, of Manhattan],” he says, mock-aghast. “I have a family now, kids. I mean, this is so embarrassing.” All the while, Allen is laughing in the background. “You look good though,” Harbour tells the visitor. “Come on in.”

A 2023 Architectural Digest video, ‘Inside David Harbour and Lily Allen’s Brooklyn Townhouse’, has not aged well.

And so begins a video tour of Harbour and Allen’s chintzy townhouse in Brooklyn, New York, that went viral when it was released by Architectural Digest magazine in February 2023. The couple proudly showed off their “plain English kitchen”, complete with doughnuts freshly made by Allen, as well as their embroidery featuring visual representations of various sexually-transmitted diseases and bedroom without any windows.

Allen explained that the small bedroom, devoid of any natural light and festooned in pink, was designed as such because Harbour is a “vampire” who likes to sleep in late. “It is cool when you design a room with no windows in it,” Harbour says in the video. “...You make the bedroom just a place for couple activities.”

The light-hearted jokiness of that video takes on a new, more uncomfortable feeling when rewatched today. Allen and Harbour have divorced – and she has sought to pin the blame for the relationship’s failure squarely on her ex-husband with what may be the most brutal break-up album of all time.

The release of West End Girl last week confirms that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. It paints an unflattering picture of an open marriage gone wrong, with a man who has an obsession with sex and causes untold misery to his long-suffering wife. The album is shot through with desperation and hurt feelings, while the seemingly candid vignettes include the husband’s unwillingness to play by the rules of their arrangement and the discovery of his sex toys hidden in a carrier bag from a chemist.

David Harbour and Lily Allen at the 2022 Met Gala.

Allen has said in the past week that the album is “inspired by what went on in the relationship” and “could be considered auto-fiction”, the literary style of blending fact with invention favoured by such novelists as Karl Ove Knausgård and Marguerite Duras.

The title track starts as an upbeat opener to the album, with Allen enthusing about the brownstone home the newlyweds bought. But the honeymoon period ends abruptly, after Allen is offered the leading role in a play, which is presumed to be 2:22 A Ghost Story; Allen was nominated for an Olivier award for her star turn in the run, which started in August 2021.

West End Girl ends with us hearing a one-sided phone call where it is clear that the husband character is telling his wife, on the other side of the Atlantic, that he wants to open up their marriage because she is so far away and he needs to have sex. “Well, I mean it doesn’t feel great / Well, if that’s what you need to do then,” Allen says on the phone. “I mean, it makes me really sad but… I just, I want you to be happy.”

The implication is that, after less than a year of marriage and a previous pledge to be monogamous, Harbour flipped this at the first available opportunity. (Allen’s first marriage, to builder and decorator Sam Cooper, was marred by her own infidelities, which were so numerous that she has said he had made her catalogue them when they broke up.)

Soon after she wed Harbour, Allen was asked in a Sunday Times interview if she thought monogamy was possible. “Erm, yeah. At this point it is. And I’d like it to stay that way,” she said. “At this point we’re up for monogamy.”

We are told that the dream is definitively dashed by the second track on the new album, and the later ones continue the story, charting Allen’s torment over the state of the marriage.

“We had an arrangement / Be discreet, and don’t be blatant,” she sings on Madeline, apparently about another woman the husband has been seeing. “There had to be payment / It had to be with strangers / But you’re not a stranger, Madeline.”

As if all this were not enough to make Harbour an uncomfortable listener of his ex-wife’s new record, the song Pussy Palace is a devastating tale of what Allen finds in the marital bedroom that references Duane Reade, an American pharmacy chain, and Trojan condoms.

Lily Allen spills the tea on her ex in her latest album.

Allen said in an interview with Perfect Magazine this week that she did not like the concept of an open marriage. “I grew up in a really unstable household,” she told former Esquire editor Alex Bilmes. “Neither of my parents was particularly present. And so what I craved in adulthood from my relationships was to be centred. And I’m not particularly interested in anything else.”

The break-up pushed Allen to the brink and almost caused her to relapse into drink and drug abuse, leaving her to check herself into rehab. “The feelings of despair that I was experiencing were so strong,” she told Vogue. “The last time that I felt anything like that, drugs and alcohol were my way out, so it was excruciating to sit with those [feelings] and not use them.”

Allen recorded the album in a frenzied 10-day period last December, as she came to terms with the end of her second marriage. “It was incredibly manic, and it was emotionally traumatic. But nothing felt forced,” she said in the Perfect interview.

Even before the apparent revelations from Allen’s new album, theirs was not the most conventional relationship. They met on Raya, the celebrity dating app, while Harbour was filming in London and first stepped out together to see a production of The Lehman Trilogy on the West End in August 2019. A little over a year later, they were married in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator, before the couple ate with Allen’s two daughters from her first marriage at In-N-Out, a fast-food chain.

Allen was not Harbour’s first famous partner. Though he has previously dated Alison Sudol, who stars in the Fantastic Beasts film series, 10 Things I Hate About You star Julia Stiles and Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s Maria Thayer, he has kept his love life relatively under wraps.

What we know about his romantic preferences have come from Allen herself. She said last year that Harbour thought her OnlyFans account, in which she sold photographs of her feet to strangers online, was “great” and that he asked her if it was a kink of hers.

Since their split became common knowledge at the start of the year, Harbour has been linked with Ellie Fallon, an aspiring model who, at 27, is more than two decades his junior.

Allen, meanwhile, has publicly lamented how depressing she finds the dating scene as a woman in her fifth decade who has two teenage children. “It’s bitterly disappointing,” she told Perfect. “There’s an element of humiliation and shame around it. The world doesn’t portray women of my age as being desirable…”

The singer has won admiration in many corners for the frank, public way she has dealt with her latest heartbreak. Allen was applauded at a live recording of her podcast with her cohost Miquita Oliver in London this March when she said “murder may have crossed my mind recently”, and warned an audience member that marriage “is a contract, which is very difficult to get out of… and very painful”.

Harbour, for his part, has remained silent about the end of his relationship with Allen. “I’m protective of the people and the reality of my life,” Harbour told GQ in April. “There’s no use in that form of engaging [with tabloid news] because it’s all based on hysterical hyperbole.”

The release of Allen’s album may force Harbour to change tack, not least as it doesn’t sit well with his upcoming press tour for children’s TV show Stranger Things. He continues to star in Marvel films and TV series and is set to appear in Goat, a children’s animated film about animals that play sport. Ironically, Harbour once hailed Allen as a “genius” whom he admired because she “speaks a lot of her truth”.

“I am excited about the possibility of [the album] helping me to move on,” Allen told Perfect.

She clearly feels that the best way to get some kind of closure is to get everything off her chest in the most public way possible.

The Telegraph, London