Lily Allen’s fairy tale romance with Stranger Things actor David Harbour is over, almost five years after their charming Las Vegas wedding. The relationship that began promisingly on celebrity dating app Raya has now ended after the singer did some sleuthing, Colleen Rooney style.
Rumours of a split began circulating when Lily was spotted back on the app, when in reality the 39-year-old had only joined to suss out whether husband David, 49, was back on it, according to The Mail on Sunday.
The paper reports that the actor, who plays Hopper in the Netflix Sci-Fi drama series on Netflix, was back on Raya reportedly looking for new matches.
But the singer had not turned her back on her marriage — she was desperately trying to save it, even making a heartbroken plea on her own Raya profile, saying: “Looking for someone to attend couples therapy with me”, in hope she wouldn’t come across David’s profile.
Friends of the star told the Mail: “Lily was looking for women that were on Raya and cross-referencing them with women David follows on Instagram to try to figure out who he was seeing. She has never even looked at anyone since she met David. She is devastated. He broke up with Lily a month ago.”
The Stranger Things star was more than a partner to Lily — he also has supported her as she began her journey of sobriety, neither of them touching a drop of alcohol since the early days of their five-year romance.
David successfully battled his own demons decades earlier – after struggling with alcohol abuse in his early twenties and has credited sobriety to helping turn his life around and building a solid acting career – appearing in a string of TV shows and films before finding global fame in Stranger Things.
Lily herself is motivated to keep teetotal, telling her friend Miquita Oliver on their acclaimed podcast, Miss Me? last year that she’s motivated to stay sober because of all the good things she now has in her life.
But in recent months her marriage appeared to be on very shaky ground. Lily and David were last pictured together in October in New York where they share a home. Lily has not been seen wearing her wedding ring in recent clips on the podcast which was named the best podcast of 2024 for their fearless and frank conversations.
The first inkling of marital trouble came when Lily spoke of being “bored of men” and how “the main male person” in her life was her mum’s partner, calling him a “pillar of support”.
But more recently Lily spoke of her New York Christmas – hinting she had a last-minute change of plan, spending it without David and instead taking her daughters Ethel, 13 and Marnie,11, from her marriage to businessman Sam Cooper, on safari in Kenya.
The singer has spoken of how she has become a better person as well as a better parent to her children, able to deal with life’s ups and downs and communicate with her children – through five years of sobriety.
The Smile singer, who’s been married before, has had a difficult romantic life – officially splitting from former husband Sam in 2016 after a five-year marriage. Lily had experienced the trauma of giving birth to their stillborn baby in 2010 before marrying Sam in 2010 and becoming parents to daughters Ethel and Marnie.
She admitted she had been unfaithful during the marriage and that while on tour for her 2014 Sheezus album, she slept with female escorts “cause I was lost and lonely and looking for something.”
In 2018, she told Channel Seven’s Sunrise show while promoting her memoir, that she met the escorts in 2014 when she was suffering from post-natal depression after the birth of her second daughter Marnie a year earlier.
Speaking about that period of time, she said: “I lost my sense of self. I lost my identity. I was being a bad mum. I was being bad at my job. I’d wake up on a tour bus in the middle of Wisconsin and be so hungover. I cheated on my husband. All I wanted to do was be with my kids.”
Her relationship with DJ Meridian began after the breakdown of her marriage with Sam. Before that, Lily had a drunken fling with Liam Gallagher — having sex with the married Oasis rocker who was wedded to Nicole Appleton — on a plane in 2009. The one night stand came after Lily split with art dealer Jay Jopling.
In her early twenties she dated DJ Seb Chew before meeting Chemical Brother star Ed Simons of the Chemical Brothers. During the brief relationship, Lily suffered the heartbreak of a miscarriage. The couple ended their romance shortly afterwards.
But joining Raya changed her fortunes in love, or so she hoped.
Lily married David, at the Graceland Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas in September 2020. The sweet ceremony was officiated by an Elvis impersonator – following a whirlwind year-long romance after meeting on exclusive dating app Raya in the summer of 2019. A few months previously, she had announced her split from boyfriend DJ Meridian Dan after three years.
The relationship began while David was in the UK filming Black Widow. Initially, Lily assumed it wouldn’t last, saying: “When I met him, I didn’t think it would go anywhere. He was here filming Black Widow. He was only going to be here for a couple of months. And then it did.”
Right at the start of their romance, Lily decided on to quit drinking. The star says she last consumed alcohol on July 28 2019. “In my early days of sobriety, I did a lot of work, I went to a lot of meetings, I did my step work and I had a sponsor,” she said.
The couple were first spotted together in August 2019 in London’s West End watching a play together and then leaving halfway through.
Speaking on podcast Miss Me? last year, Lily revealed that the theatre outing had been their third date – when she would have been seven days into her sobriety.
In the July 2024 episode, Lily said: “We’d been out for dinner a couple of times and then the third time I went out with him we went to the theatre to go and see The Lehman Trilogy, I think it was in the first bit of the play… he just like grabbed my hand…And then he whispered in my ear, ‘Shall we just like get out of here?’ Then we left – and the rest was history.”
David has yet to comment on the alleged new Raya profile he has set up, in which The Mail says, he describes himself as a “closet nerd that plays tough guys on your TV.” He says he is living in Atlanta, Georgia – where he bought a house to be closer to the Stranger Things set – and “visiting New York”, where he and Lily have a family home with Lily’s children enrolled in local schools.
Professionally, Lily is thriving, with her popular podcast, an acting career that has landed her a Laurence Oliver Best Actress nomination for her role in 2: 22 A Ghost Story, and is due to star in a new adaption of the play Hedda – exploring the role of women in Victorian society later this year.
Neither Lily or David have yet to comment on the reported split.