Lily Collins’ turn as Snow White in Tarsem Singh’s family-friendly Mirror Mirror feels like something of a dream come true as she’s loved fairy tales her entire life, thanks to the fact that her parents would read them to her when she would go to sleep.
   “I wanted to stay true to aspects of Snow White that we all grew up loving,” says Collins, daughter of singer Phil Collins whose previous credits include Priest and Taylor Lautner’s Abduction, “but we also kind of modernized her in that she becomes a fighter, mentally and physically, at the end of the story and ends up saving the prince as much as he saves her and fights for her own destiny. Because we did modernize her in the story, it brings her more down to Earth than a fairy tale princess that you put on a pedestal and who is untouchable. In order for an audience, especially the younger audience, to feel attached to the story and to feel like they could be friends with Snow White, we had to make her more personable and make her more like what a teenage girl would have been like in that time and situation. So in that sense it was nice to bring aspects of myself to the character, while obviously maintaining that princess-ish quality.”
   One highlight for her was acting opposite Julia Roberts, who plays completely against type as the Evil Queen.
“Everyone knows her smile, her laugh, her sweet roles, and what she does is take that and uses it in this new conniving, eerie, creepy way,” Collins says with a smile. “It’s like a mean girl in high school smiling at you and saying something completely horrible, but because she has this smile on her face you don’t know if she’s serious or if you’re supposed to love her or hate her. That’s how Julia plays it, she plays to Snow White’s naivete, because she’s aware of the evil things in the world whereas Snow White doesn’t understand her evil nature at first. Julia just plays it in an unexpected way, but then they yelled cut and she was so sorry; she was, like, ‘Are you OK? I hated being mean to you.’ I know it sounds strange, but it was like an honor for me to share the screen with her, let alone be the one she’s mean to. I was, like, ‘It’s fine. I’ll be the victim of your wrath.’”