Greta Lee

Greta Lee sweeps into this upscale New York brasserie offering various apologies and explanations: for being late for breakfast, for cancelling our previous meeting, for having no eyebrows. The first of these barely needs excusing – she’s only running a few minutes behind, and it’ll soon become clear just how raced off her feet she is right now. (Notwithstanding how animated and engaged she’ll present as, she’ll wryly note towards our conversation’s end, “I think I’ve said ‘I’m tired’ maybe 20 times.”) The second, even less. On the day we were originally to have met near her home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her writer-actor-producer husband, Russ Armstrong, and their two young sons, the Altadena fire not far to the north was less than 24 hours old and still raging uncontrolled. That morning, the wind had carried burnt pages of books into their yard. Not just books, either. She shows me a picture of one such scrap on her phone. “I found a page of someone’s screenplay,” she says, “which I felt was so LA. And on the backside, in pencil, someone had written the word fuck.” Then she shows me a second photo from that day, one of the sun in the sky over the hills – a sun that, filtered through the smoke, was an unnatural bright red. “This was the moment we decided to leave,” she says, “because it looked like Satan was descending upon the earth.”

As for the eyebrows, that relates to the reason she is in New York. Greta Lee is 42, and for the first 20 years of her acting career, great opportunities were few and far between. She built an impressive CV from the scrapings she could find (most notably her memorable hyper-stylised turns on TV series such as Russian Doll, Girls and The Morning Show). But she had gradually come to accept that the various grander careers she had once imagined – “When I was 21, I had these great aspirations to become someone like Vanessa Redgrave” – would remain out of her reach. “I really felt like I was dead in the water, and I was sort of at my own funeral, but sort of happily so,” she tells me. “It’s like you, I don’t know, you let go a little.”

That all changed in 2023 with her remarkable performance – improbably, her first leading role – in Celine Song’s Oscar-nominated Past Lives, the quietly wrenching, slow-burn tale of what happens to a happily married South Korean émigré in New York when her childhood love comes to town. It granted Greta the chance to be on camera as she had never been allowed to before: in a deeper, more naturalistic way. “It was very challenging for me to just let myself be in the frame of whatever was happening,” she recalls. “Early on, I would try to improvise lines, and I would try to entertain, and Celine was like: ‘Stop that. Don’t speak.’” The lesson really sunk in when they filmed the shot of her character in a taxi – “for me, a pivotal moment in the film” – and the camera held on her face for several minutes. Greta realised she had never before been allowed to act like this – “uninterrupted, in a continuous shot” – for even a fraction of the time. “The privilege of being able to just exist as the character, and that’s all, was outrageous and just so radical to me.”

Almost overnight, Past Lives changed everything for her. It wasn’t just one of those roles that impress you for what the actor does. It was one of those roles that make you imagine all the other things that same actor might do.

Since then, Greta has been in constant demand. The latest opportunity she is embracing is a role opposite Willem Dafoe in the film Late Fame. Dafoe plays a man whose poetry is discovered late in his life by a younger coterie; Greta’s role is described as that of a “mercurial theatre actress”. Today is Saturday; she begins filming on Monday. The lack of eyebrows are this new character’s. “I currently just look like an alien person, and I can’t believe I had to go pick up my kids from school looking like this,” Greta says. (No eyebrows aside, this morning her effect is discreet breakfast-casual cool – a loosely buttoned shirt she bought in Paris and some lightly oil-stained men’s Carhartt trousers.)

She shares some concern that she’s not ready and mentions that on Tuesday she’ll have to sing, in a way that suggests Tuesday might be coming way too soon. She’s certainly had little recent calm time to prepare. While the Los Angeles fires were still burning, she flew to Vancouver to film reshoots for the big-budget science-fiction sequel Tron: Ares, and she describes to me the consequent “brain confusion” she faced. “I’m in a dolly harness, in a light suit, and trying to convey other things, and the production value of the situation is so grand. I’m up in the air, and I’m sort of pretending that I’m falling, and there’s wind,” she says. “And then when they yell ‘Cut!’, having to jump on my phone and engage with the school WhatsApp thread, covered in fake blood. Looking at my phone and assessing the AQI [Air Quality Index].” She emphasises that she’s not in the least unappreciative of or unexcited by the possibilities of her new life, but the non-stop relentlessness clearly requires some adjustment. “This is so beyond anything that I had ever dreamed of being real,” she says.

Greta Lee is the child of South Korean immigrants who came to the US in the 1970s. The almost impossibly apposite story she was told of how she came by her first name is this: her paternal grandfather, Yang Ki Lee, unable to fight in the Korean War because of a polio-damaged leg, was given the job of painting movie billboards on American army bases. He came to know and love the cinematic icons of those days: Katharine Hepburn, Gary Cooper, Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Greta Garbo. That was where her name came from. (Or so she grew up believing, anyway. Once she started telling this story in interviews, her mother, Jane Lee, insisted to her she’d chosen it from a book of American names.)

The family settled in the Los Angeles suburbs. Her mother gave up her previous life as a concert pianist, while her father, Peter Lee, a doctor, established a pain clinic. Greta was their oldest child; she has a younger sister and brother. She sang as a teenager – performing baroque music in local competitions, while entertaining fantasies of becoming Mariah Carey – and was then accepted into Northwestern University’s School of Communication, where she concentrated on musical theatre and explored sketch comedy (through which she met her husband-to-be). Moving to New York, she landed an 18-month stint in a Broadway musical. If she imagined things would always go so well, she soon learned otherwise.

Greta tries to give me a sense of how she had felt from a young age. “This feeling of, like, Oh no – the world might not see me as I feel like I exist within my own mind. Because as a kid I always had this sense of feeling like an underdog, sometimes for no reason. It had a lot to do with being a girl. I’m not talking about acting. But sports, or the way my father saw certain boys and not me. The world around me being Korean, and having immigrant parents, and being at this private school in LA that was very elite, but feeling like, Oh, I can beat you.” She laughs. “But beat them at what?”

In times to come, during the years when her acting career felt stymied, there would be plenty of new reasons to feel like this. Not only did the roles available to Asian actors seem circumscribed in particular ways, but in a cruel double bind, Greta often found herself a poor fit for the desired stereotypes. “I was not still enough,” she says. “I was too dark-skinned. I did not present as the white image of what being Asian was. Like, being Oriental.” She describes one particularly grim experience auditioning for a big-budget historical film about the lives of Asian women. “I remember praying to the gods: ‘Please. If I’m going to be an actress, how can I not be in that movie?’ I prepared. I poured everything into it. But then they asked me at the end, ‘Now, can you do it in an accent?’ It was hilarious. It was the most offensive thing I’ve probably ever done in my life. ‘Can you do it in an accent?’ I’m just thinking, ‘I want this job.’ I had to say the word noodles repeatedly. Horrible.” Even then, she says, she left that room feeling like “maybe I got it! Just praying.” It would have been a big role. “Like,” she says, deadpan, “the third prostitute.” But of course the final indignity was that she had not got it. “I was devastated. Early on, those hits were really, really hard. They were like big body blows.”

When Greta did pick up parts, she would do everything she possibly could to make the most of them. “I used to hate when people would call me a scene-stealer,” she tells me, “because it all felt too revealing of my fight.” She flinches a little when I quote something she once said about realising she was working 300 times harder than her peers – “I don’t want to sound like an asshole” – but she reaffirms that that is what it felt like. “That feeling of that fight, the kind of panic acting. I need to figure out quickly and on my own how to make this really sing, to give myself some sort of shot. The labour of trying to strategise. Like it’s war. Moments like that where I am just rewriting in my mind, literally rewriting the scenes, and rehearsing them myself, and thinking: Maybe if I wait till the takes at the end when they’re all tired out I’m going to slip in all this stuff…” Always aware that not everyone else needed to do any of this. “I look over at some of my other co-stars – they were just eating chips.”

Around the time Covid arrived, Greta felt a shift in what she was prepared to tolerate. She remembers one moment, early in the epidemic, before masking, when at the beginning of a long flight a woman started screaming at her – the only Asian nearby – accusing her of not covering her mouth when she was coughing. “There were many people coughing, but she turned around and saw me and said: ‘You.’ Then I had to endure a six-hour flight behind this woman, just paralysed. I was like, Should I say something? Should I explain to her the racial bias of…? Like, What should I do? Did anybody else see?” Incidents like that nudged her towards what she describes as “this new sense of ‘I don’t want to participate in that version of the world any more.’”

It heightened her scrutiny of the parts coming her way – “some of these supporting roles that are underwritten and sometimes even racist.” She started saying no a lot more. “I felt like the more I was OK with that and feeding that, nothing good could come of it. I was saying no to supporting roles that were really about lifting up somebody else – this is how I felt at the time – who was white. Like, over and over and over again. Of narratively, structurally in the story, being a person who was just around to fill out and create texture to a white person’s life and world. That’s how I felt.”

She had also been trying to create better opportunities by writing them, spurred by advice Amy Schumer gave her when Greta was appearing on Inside Amy Schumer. “At the time, it was incredibly annoying for her to say that to me: ‘Just write,’” Greta says. “She was, ‘Type type type on your laptop.’” What maybe grated most was realising how much sense it made. “She’s right. Because the things that I am so upset that I’m not being given, well, who’s going to write them? That Joe Schmo is not going to write the thing I have in my mind. So that was the beginning of it.”

But even these scripts she wrote – a number over the years, some of which went into development, though none yet made – weren’t immune to new versions of old forces. Even when her ethnicity was seen as an asset, it could also be a constraint. “It became clear that the marketplace and the networks were looking at me and my project as like, ‘So this will be your version of Atlanta, right? So you want to be Donald Glover.’ What? What about what I’m saying or doing makes you think that that’s what I want? The identity politics of it all became, in and of itself, problematic.”

Constantly shifting, too. At a later point, she says, “I heard from the networks we were working with that certain shows that were kind of deemed too woke were not performing well.” She had written a pilot for a project she felt deeply passionate about, an adaptation of Cathy Park Hong’s breathtakingly coruscating account of the Korean American experience, Minor Feelings, and she remembers being offered some feedback. “A network executive asked me if I could make it more like Cheers.”

The success of Past Lives offered her a different path forward, and she explains that for now she has decided – “It really pains me to say” – to put Minor Feelings aside. “I can’t believe it,” she says of this decision. “At the time, I was so sure that I would commit crimes to see it through and have it be made.” But right now, in her new situation, she sees new ways of achieving similar goals. “I would rather do something like Tron, where the female lead is me, and I’m not pointing at jars of kimchi and saying, like, ‘Welcome to my culture, and let me tell you all the ways you’ve wronged me.’”

All kinds of doors are now swinging open for her. Recently, for instance, Greta starred in a campaign for Calvin Klein underwear. When the invitation came, she felt as if she had to say yes. “It felt like progress – like, Oh my gosh, this is the real changing of what the industry could be like. I felt like, really, it does fit in line with this idea of what could be possible for a woman who on paper is all these things – mom in her 40s, is me, and all these other different boxes that you can check. To then be given that chance to take up that slot…” That doesn’t mean it came naturally, at least at first. “The fitting was really embarrassing and hard,” she says. “Because I’d never stood in my underwear in front of people. I’d never shown my body. I think I was joking that I have friends who’ve never seen my belly button before.” But she was glad to do it. “That was really exciting to me. It was another new radical thing. I was like, Oh, can I do this? Can I?”

Perhaps similarly, she also recently filmed her first sex scenes, for the forthcoming fourth season of The Morning Show, in a role she was originally excited to take because it allowed her to act opposite Billy Crudup, and one which has stealthily blossomed over the previous two seasons as her character became president of the UBA network’s news division. “I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a love affair for her. It’s physical, which I’d never done before.”

Again, she was drawn to do it – “Having lived and had children, and my very new relationship with my physical self, has made me more interested in different aspects of what it is to be a woman” – though, once more, embracing that principle didn’t make the experience less awkward. “It’s sort of like filming a porn in front of your cousins,” she says, laughing. “Like, it’s really unbearable. It’s not what you’d think. It ultimately is just horrifically embarrassing for everyone. The crew, these guys I’ve known for years – on the day you feel like everyone’s mad at you because no one’s making eye contact, no one’s talking to you. In an effort to be so incredibly respectful, you just get iced out all day! My co-star, too – I mean, God bless him, in the epitome of professionalism, and with this new modern-day respect – asked me, ‘Is it OK if I touch your elbow?’” In response, she pointed out the part in that day’s script where it said: “They fuck intensely.” “I was, ‘I hope to God you touch my elbow!’” she says. “So figuring all of that out, at this point in my career and with this age – it was just hysterical.”

In recent months, Greta has also filmed an unnamed Kathryn Bigelow ensemble project for Netflix, about which she can say little other than that The Hurt Locker’s director is “marvellous”. After Late Fame, she will film the science-fiction movie 11817 in London, and then, prospectively, My Notes on Mars, opposite Andrew Scott.

But Tron: Ares – scheduled for release in October – was the first new opportunity Greta accepted in the wake of Past Lives. In fact, she was already in Vancouver filming as the Past Lives promotional campaign rolled onwards. This, she mentions, made for some interesting disjunctions. “The night before the Oscars last year,” she says, “I was running outside in the middle of the street in the rain like my life depended on it, away from something, until about one or two in the morning. Then I got on the plane. And I had to take one of those vitamin IV drips, because I was like a corpse, dead-body woman who had to be erected and put in a dress.” Arriving in Los Angeles, she was told she needed to go to the Oscars ceremony, the Vanity Fair party and Beyoncé’s Gold Party, the night’s final stop, before returning to Vancouver the next day to film a scene in which she would pretend to assemble a laser.

That Beyoncé party, which marked the unofficial end of the Hollywood awards season, turned out to be something else. “I mean, this is just my own assessment of it,” Greta says, “but by then everyone is so tired and so hungry – because I feel like people collectively were starving themselves throughout the season – and this is the breaking point. So everyone is obliterated. I’ve never seen a group of people that drunk before. I was also partaking, but you look over and – without naming names – just people falling over, left and right, like trees. And there are the famous bowls of caviar. I think I saw Leonardo DiCaprio just parked in front of one, silently eating. And I thought, There’s someone smart. He knows what he’s doing. He’s been here before.”

She has other stories, too, from her time on the kind of high-flown promotional circuit she’d never experienced before. “We were such a small movie, but to be along for the ride next to Marty, and Oppenheimer, and Barbie…” Marty, of course, is Martin Scorsese, who she found herself talking to at one event. “And I’m just, Oh my God, did I say that to Scorsese? Oh my God. I did!”

I ask her what it is she believes she said. “I think I screamed my name repeatedly, to ensure that he would remember me. I really think I just said, ‘My name is Greta Lee!’ And I said, ‘Marty, how many more movies do you think you have in you?’” She writhes in embarrassment. “He laughed, thank God,” she says. “There’s a very easy trap where you mistake all these people for your actual friends. I feel really grateful that I have a husband who couldn’t give two shits about any of this, and these kids who immediately put me back in my place.”

Such are Greta’s new dilemmas, and she is doing her best to find her way. “I think most of us, a lot of the good ones, are so deeply introverted and a little weird,” she points out. One conundrum of the successful acting life is the tension between what you needed to get you there, and what you’ll need once you arrive. “All of a sudden I’m supposed to be, like, a masterful speech giver and a model and all these things.” Meanwhile, it can seem as if all the opportunities you were once denied are rushing your way in an unstoppable flood. “I would have killed for some of this for years and years and years,” Greta says. “Now I’m not able to say yes to everything that I want to do so badly.” But that’s what’s bound to happen now that, more and more, the world already knows what she no longer needs to say: her name is Greta Lee.