Greta Lee’s career didn’t take a conventional path. But it did lead to her dream role

This story is part of the August 6 edition of Sunday Life.See all 14 stories.

Greta Lee shines at playing the entrancing oddball, the scene-stealing weirdo you can’t take your eyes off. Over the years, the actor has channelled Soojin, an entitled, self-absorbed art gallery owner who thinks she’s poor but isn’t (Girls); Hae Won, a nail salon technician who can party with the best of them – in this case, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler (Sisters); and Maxine, the free spirit caught in an inescapable time loop with her best friend, played by Natasha Lyonne (the TV series Russian Doll). What Lee hasn’t got to play often are characters who are, to use her word, restrained.

For many actors, restraint is not necessarily something to strive for. “A lot of times, as performers, we’re fighting this unspoken desire to show you can do something,” she says. “To show you understand the assignment.”

Audiences will get to see a bit more restraint and a lot more of what Lee can do in her new film, Past Lives. After years of making the most of small parts, the actor’s talents have long been obvious to anyone with eyeballs, whether she was performing on Broadway (briefly) or in some of TV’s more groundbreaking comedies. All that was needed for Lee to move up was the right role – in this case, her first leading role, one that almost didn’t come her way.

In Past Lives, she plays Nora, a Korean-Canadian playwright who reunites with the childhood sweetheart she left behind in Seoul when her family migrated 24 years before. The film also stars Teo Yoo (Love to Hate You) as Hae Sung, the man who still wonders what might have been, and John Magaro (Not Fade Away), as Nora’s husband Arthur, a writer forced to wonder what might have been, too, when Hae Sung comes to New York for a short but affecting visit.

“I always had a burning fire to prove something, either to myself or to whatever authority figure there was in my life.”

GRETA LEE

In many ways, Nora is about as far from Lee’s roster of scene-stealing roles as you can imagine: measured and still rather than riotous or offbeat; the humour, when it comes, wry. It’s a breakthrough performance in a film that has already earned rave reviews. The Times described it as “a gorgeous, glowing, aching thing” after it premiered at Sundance and played at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. The Los Angeles Times called her turn a “career-making performance”, while The Hollywood Reporter singled out the “extraordinary depths” of her portrayal of Nora.

“I’ve played a lot of larger-than-life people,” Lee says. “This is entirely different. I was really attracted to what that could be, and whether or
not I could pull it off.”

If Nora is nothing like many of Lee’s previous party-girl characters, neither is Lee herself. She’s a mother, for starters, of two young boys with her husband, Russ Armstrong.

On set, “Greta is like a Hunter S. Thompson-meets-Fellini character,” Natasha Lyonne said in an interview. “She’s a total original.”

And while Lee’s characters can seem way too cool to be seen with you or your friends, she herself isn’t above getting excited about all sorts of things, including how kind and receptive everyone has been about this latest movie of hers.

“I’ve played a lot of larger-than-life people,” Lee says. “This is entirely different.”Credit: Cole Barash/DSReps/Headpress

“I’m going to show you,” she says, pulling out her phone. She plays a tiny clip she’d shot on her phone of the blocks-long line to get into a recent screening of Past Lives. “It keeps going! Still going. Still going. Isn’t this completely wild?”

Lee, now 40, was born in Los Angeles and spent most of her childhood there. The daughter of Korean immigrants and the oldest of three children, she experienced much of her early life as a series of firsts.

“I was the first kid in the family to be an American citizen, the first to go to school here, just navigating all these things,” she said. “I always had
a burning fire to prove something, either to myself or to whatever authority figure there was in my life.”

Growing up, she loved sports (“there are Olympic wrestlers on my dad’s side”) and musical performance. She played the piano, studied opera, sang Liza Minnelli numbers at the local mall, took modern-dance classes, competed in classical music festivals (and won). “I know a lot of Italian arias and German art songs,” she says.

After high school, Lee attended Northwestern University, near Chicago, in the hope of going into musical theatre. “Back then it was Miss Saigon, South Pacific, The King and I,” she says. “It’s kind of sad to think about now. It was so limited in what it could be. But it was still enough for me to feel like there was something here that I deeply want to be a part of.”

For a time, she hustled for any type of role. “I was meeting rejection and obstacles, and I remember feeling constantly like I was falling behind,” she says, recalling a five-year stretch during which she booked just a few TV episodes.

Still, all that auditioning paid off. In 2010, Lee found herself acting on Broadway in a revival of La Bête, a comedy set in the 17th century starring David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley. Even then, she was multitasking. “I would do that play, and then change out of my corset and walk around the corner to MTV’s TRL studios, where I was a VJ.”

“It’s not a conventional love story or love triangle. And the woman at the centre of the story is really different from others I’ve seen in films.”

GRETA LEE

Supporting parts in celebrated series like High Maintenance, Girls and Inside Amy Schumer followed. In 2019, Lee landed regular roles on the streaming series Russian Doll, which finished its second season last month, and The Morning Show, which has been renewed for a fourth season.

Lee read the script for Past Lives the following year and was immediately captivated. “It really stood out in terms of what a romantic drama could be,” she says. “It’s not a conventional love story or love triangle. And the woman at the centre of the story is really different from others I’ve seen in films.”

Not long after that first read, “I got a phone call from an assistant asking if I was available for an important meeting,” she says. “I assumed I had gotten the job!” But the assistant had the wrong number, and it turned out that the message, unrelated to Past Lives, was for Barbie director Greta Gerwig.

In fact, Lee wasn’t even being considered for the part. For months, Celine Song, the writer and director of Past Lives, had been looking at other Noras, other Hae Sungs. “They cast it with two other people,” Lee says.

According to Song, the oversight had little to do with Lee herself. The film’s story is loosely based on the true-life reunion of Song, her American husband and her Korean school pal, an event which took place when the director was 29.

“When you’re young, you think that being 29 is so interesting and cool and meaningful,” says Song about the task of casting Nora. “So I was trying to find somebody at 30, or even in their 20s – and Greta, of course, was in her late 30s. It was really stupid.”

After Song came to her senses, she contacted Lee. A year had passed since Lee had first read the script, but she still remembered it: her soul-mate film, she called it. Could she meet with Song, via Zoom, that day? After a video audition that stretched for 2½ hours, with Lee reading key scenes as Song played the two male leads (“Celine makes an excellent Arthur and Hae Sung,” Lee says), Song offered Lee the part on the spot.

In addition to Past Lives, Lee returns in September as network executive Stella Bak in the third season of The Morning Show. “I think people are really going to be excited about her arc on this season,” she says.

Right now, however, Lee’s focus is on Past Lives.

“I think the path I took, as an Asian-American woman, was different from what is conventional,” she says. “Certain points in my life during this journey didn’t always make sense to other people. But it makes so much sense to me now. I feel like I’ve been working really hard to make sure I was ready for the day when a role like Nora Moon would come my way.”

Past Lives will screen at the Melbourne International Film Festival (August 3-20) and in cinemas from August 31.

The New York Times

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