With the word-of-mouth hit film Past Lives and The Morning Show, it’s been quite the year for the actress — especially as she never thought she’d make it at all.
Before the release of Past Lives, not many people outside Korea had heard of “in-yun” — the idea that people are destined to be together based on a connection in a previous life. It transpires that the film’s breakout star, Greta Lee, didn’t know that much about it either. “It felt like a very foreign, esoteric concept,” she tells me. “But now, having done the movie, I’ve realised it’s much more casual. You and I would have in-yun because here we are talking at this moment. You can have in-yun with objects, in-yun with a chair. I feel like now I can’t unsee in-yun. I would like an in-yun break!”
There’s little chance of that — since its release in September Past Lives has been a runaway success. The debut film of the 35-year-old writer-director Celine Song, it’s a story of what ifs, of a life — and love — that could have been very different, and is one of those rare movies that has touched a collective nerve, often leaving audiences in tears (or at least contemplating the twists and turns of their own lives). Lee plays the leading role of Nora in a performance that has helped to earn the film its five-star reviews. Nora’s family leave Seoul — and her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) — for a new life in Canada when she’s 12. She and Hae Sung then reconnect in their early twenties, albeit virtually through Skype, before meeting again in person in their thirties — with Nora, now a playwright, married to fellow writer Arthur (John Magaro) — in her new home town of New York.
The movie, Lee says, is about “humans, and how incredible it is that we have this seemingly unending capacity to love, maybe more than one person even, and in different ways”. To make the feelings of anticipation so realistic, Song kept the three performers apart as much as possible, so Yoo and Magaro, the actors who play the two men in Nora’s life, met for the first time on screen. “What you see is the actual footage of them meeting. That was the best take, so Celine used that in the movie.” Rather like in the film, the two actors asked Lee endless questions about each other beforehand. “Both are veterans, absolute professionals, but they were both human when it came to certain things, such as John needing to know just how handsome Teo really is,” Lee says, laughing.
Sitting in the busy bar of a London hotel, Lee looks like Nora’s sophisticated older sister — her outfit is a masterclass in quiet luxury: a white Khaite top, black trousers from The Row and an oatmeal sweater tied over her shoulders just so. But beneath the serene exterior she’s like any other frazzled 40-year-old mother of two small children (Apollo, seven, and Raphael, four), working flat out while dealing with a real lack of sleep. “I talk about this a lot with other parents who are artists, this question of whether or not you’d be better off without kids, kind of fantasising what I’d be like. But I really believe in having children, that complexity of being a mum — it’s a cliché but you do find whole new chambers of your heart. It’s so much bigger than you ever thought.”
She nearly didn’t play Nora — “I didn’t get it!” she exclaims between mouthfuls of club sandwich — as someone else was originally cast in the role. “I fell in love with the script and I had that feeling of ‘I have to be a part of this somehow.’ " She taped an audition then received a phone call. “I thought, oh my God, I think I got this job! It turned out that the voicemail was intended for [the film director] Greta Gerwig and the assistant had the wrong number. It couldn’t have been a clearer way for me to feel that this absolutely wasn’t going to happen.”
A year later, though, and totally out of the blue, Lee received a phone call that was meant for her. Song wanted to meet her the next day. “We read some scenes together and she gave me the job on the spot.” Since the script is loosely based on Song’s own experience at 29, the director had originally wanted someone younger for the role but then changed her mind.
“I’m so pleased she needed a more mature and older actress,” Lee jokes, although she is aware that in terms of acting success she is a late bloomer. “Being 40 and having whatever this is happen is amazing. Just as a woman, what that means — it still totally blows my mind. Because this is typically the age that the door closes and you’re expected to go and lie down, step aside. And that’s not happening, the opposite is happening, so I feel cautiously optimistic about what that could mean for women, for mothers.”
What does feel great about being this age, she says, “is that I can’t lie about who I am, for better or for worse. I have too many people around me who wouldn’t accept me creating some sort of new brand or a persona. That actually makes some things much easier.”
Lee’s parents moved from South Korea to Los Angeles before she was born — her father still works in rehabilitation medicine, while her mother, a former classical pianist, gave it up to become a full-time parent. As the eldest of three children, Lee recognises the amount of “grown-up juggling” she was asked to do as a child. She was sent to school on the other side of town — to “this LA private school that was a totally different world from the Korean world that I lived in. My parents had an office in Koreatown and my grandparents were there, and that’s where we spent so much of our time. And yet I was going to this fancy private school on the opposite side of town that had a lot of people of means, a lot of the children of Hollywood figures [past pupils include Lily Collins and Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal]. I think that was the beginning of my understanding of how — like Nora — to be teleported into different worlds, into different versions of yourself. But ultimately how to be more accepting of different people.”
Lee became interested in acting at school, studying theatre at university before moving to New York to try to make it. And she kept nearly making it — at 24 she had her Broadway debut in the hit musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, plus there were scene-stealing roles in Girls and the Netflix drama Russian Doll, but she never quite got there. “Sometimes it feels like I’ve been invited to a dinner party where I don’t know anyone, feeling like I need to win these people over, somehow successfully winning them over, and then having to repeat that over and over again,” is how she describes her career trajectory. But you got there, I say. “Yeah, I guess, but I don’t know where ‘there’ is. That’s the other thing about being older — at this age I just feel so awake. I think that comes from having young children under the age of seven. It’s clarifying.”
As well as Past Lives, fans of The Morning Show will have seen Lee dominate the storyline of the drama’s most recent series as Stella Bak, president of the network’s news division (complete with pitch-perfect power wardrobe), which is no mean feat when you consider that Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Billy Crudup are part of the cast.
However, despite high-profile projects such as the hit Netflix series Beef — which had a predominantly Asian cast — increasingly being made now, Lee’s not sure how much better opportunities have become for Asian actors. “I will say I am keenly aware of this huge opportunity for me and one that I was trying to accept wasn’t going to happen at all,” she says. “That’s just the reality of being a woman of colour, being Asian-American. All the roles I got to play were supporting roles — which I loved — I’d never seen myself as a victim of my circumstance. I refused, I didn’t want to live that way.”
Now that she has had success on a global scale, though, “I do feel this level of responsibility. And I would be lying if I didn’t say that I absolutely feel that, now that I’ve had this experience, I can’t pretend that I’m OK that for every one of me there are hundreds and thousands of other women of colour, Asian-American women, who are still waiting to have the chance to just do the job. I feel, ‘How can I open this door and jam it open, keep it open?’ Because I know what it’s like and I know that, even for me, I don’t want to wait until the end of my career for another opportunity like this.”
Lee’s children aren’t with her while she’s working in London — she makes the juggling work with the support of “an incredible spouse”, the actor and writer Russ Armstrong, whom she met at university. “For me there really is nothing sexier than a spouse who can hold it down. But I’m definitely trying to figure it out … I’m constantly googling other actresses to find any sort of information about how they do it!”
Coming up is Tron 3 — a sci-fi film with Jared Leto that couldn’t sound more different from Past Lives — and Problemista, a comedy with Isabella Rossellini and Tilda Swinton (“that was surreal and incredible”). There is already some serious Oscars buzz around Past Lives and Lee. (“I have no expectations,” is all she will say.) If she does attend next year’s ceremony, though, there’s a good chance she’ll be wearing Loewe on the red carpet — she’s in the brand’s most recent campaign and its creative director, Jonathan Anderson, is a friend. “I just genuinely love the clothes,” she says.
Away from acting, Lee can be found in her garden. She and her family moved from New York to LA for The Morning Show and live on a former goat ranch. “This is exposing how much of an old lady I am but I spend a lot of time in the garden,” she admits. But one thing she won’t be doing is posting pictures of herself in her backyard on Instagram. She stopped a few years back, partly because “it’s just boring”. Social media, she says, “so clearly favours the loudest voice in the room. And my own feelings are, right now, that we are living in this world that just feels louder and louder, and more and more and more. And this movie [Past Lives] felt so quietly powerful in a way that felt really f***ing badass.”
Lee filmed Past Lives in the East Village neighbourhood of New York where, in her twenties, she was trying to make it as an actress while waitressing. Being back on those streets, “was a total mindf***”, she says. “The path that I’ve walked, how long and how far, it was so surreal. I was crying when I realised we were shooting on the spot where I was once trying to learn lines in the middle of working a double shift. It was a great opportunity, a great job, I think it was Gossip Girl. And I remember thinking how impossible it felt — that this is actually impossible, this career, finding success. I couldn’t find someone to cover my shift, I was trying to learn these lines and I couldn’t. But then to shoot that movie …”And you’re the lead, I say. “Yes. That’s totally bonkers.” Or maybe it’s just in-yun.
Written by: Charlotte Williamson
© The Times of London
