Lily Collins and her husband, Charlie McDowell, are officially parents!
The couple has welcomed their first child, a baby girl named Tove Jane, via surrogate this week. “Welcome to the center of our world, Tove Jane McDowell. Words will never express our endless gratitude for our incredible surrogate and everyone who helped us along the way. We love you to the moon and back again,” Collins shared on Instagram, posting an adorable photo of baby Tove in a floral bonnet.
This sweet announcement comes as a surprise, as neither Collins nor McDowell publicly revealed they were expecting. Both have expressed their desire to start a family, though. Collins previously shared with Us Weekly in 2017 that her desire for children was a turning point in her journey to speak openly about her eating disorder. “My reason to finally start talking about [my eating disorder] was the moment I realized I wanted a family. I wanted kids. I didn’t want this to be something I bring into that,” she had said.
McDowell, a director and screenwriter, also hinted at their plans to start a family last October during an interview with E!, stating, “We would like to move into that next stage, so we’ll see when it happens.”
Collins and McDowell married in September 2021 in a private, intimate ceremony in Colorado. The couple first met on the set of the 2019 film Gilded Rage, which McDowell directed and in which Collins starred. Last year, the Emily in Paris star marked their three-year wedding anniversary on Instagram, expressing that “the best is still to come”—likely hinting at the arrival of their baby girl.