Past Lives star Greta Lee, why TMNT should be nominated, and more in EW's The Awardist

Greta Lee on the 'vulnerable' experience of falling in love in Past Lives, and how she kept her male co-stars apart

"It was slightly sadistic on Celine’s end," Lee tells 'The Awardist,' laughing. "I mean, I can't pretend that I didn't also somewhat enjoy myself."

Interview by Gerrad Hall
Illustration by Hsiao-Ron Cheng

When Greta Lee first read Past Lives, she was “completely destroyed” by writer-director Celine Song’s semi-autobiographical and “ridiculously gorgeous script.” The Morning Show and Russian Doll actress knew she had to be a part of bringing the time-jumping romance to screen. But there was a problem. “I auditioned for it, and I didn’t get it,” she divulges, a hint of disappointment still in her voice.

But here she is, the recipient of rave reviews for a role she originally lost out on but came back her way when, as she was told a year after that first audition, “they have a different idea for the movie.”

The movie has reduced audiences to tears with its story of childhood friends — Nora and Hae Sung — who lose touch when her family leaves Korea for North America. They reconnect 12 years later, thanks to Facebook and Skype, and begin a long-distance relationship of sorts...until she ends it to focus on her work as a writer. Another dozen years pass and they reconnect again, this time when Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) visits a now-married Nora (Greta Lee) and her husband Arthur (John Magaro) in New York.

Intimate, thoughtful, and profound in its approach to confronting questions about who we are, who we were, and who we could’ve been if we had made different life decisions, Past Lives is at once heartbreaking and life-affirming as it explores the Korean word "in-yun," which refers the fate of relationships and our connection to people in our past lives.

Below, Lee reveals how in-yun has made itself evident in her own life, how she ultimately ended up getting the role, why she never thought her career would include opportunities like Past Lives, how she was tasked with preventing Yoo and Magaro from meeting until their first scene together, that emotional ending, and more.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Did you audition for this? Were you approached for it? I'm really curious if you had to fight off anyone to play Nora Moon.

GRETA LEE: Oh, yeah, this didn't used to be mine. Oh, no, not at all. I read the script in one sitting and was completely destroyed by the script. It initially reminded me so much of the movies that first got me excited about acting in the first place, a kind of movie that I was afraid wasn't going to be made anymore — and not one involving someone like me — movies like Richard Linklater's movies or Wong Kar-wai. But as I read, I think maybe similar to certain audience members, I had certain expectations about how it would unfold and became clear as a love story and a love triangle. But what does that mean? And by the end, I was just totally bowled over by this person who had managed to write this ridiculously gorgeous script and I thought, Oh man, someone's gonna be really lucky to be able to do this, and good for them.

Without a thought in your mind, you really thought, there’s no way I will get this?

No way. For someone like me, you get used to this idea that there are such limited opportunities. There just are. And sometimes when there's a role like this, that is just so undeniably, the depth of it, getting to play in a much more naturalistic style is something I'd always wanted to do in a space that I always wanted to be a part of it. It's kind of sad but I almost sort of started to accept that that just wasn't the kind of career I would get to have. So this came along and I auditioned for it and I didn't get it. [Laughs]... But a year later I got this call that was basically like, “They're recasting, they have a different idea for the movie. Are you free essentially now to meet with the director?” We met and we read through some scenes…the Skype scene — the breakup scene between Nora and Hae Sung — and we also read one of the bedroom scenes with Arthur. It was just the two of us. And then I got to hear from her what her vision for the movie was and we just talked. And at the end of it, she offered me the job. I have all these pictures of me, these selfies that I took just because I needed some sort of tangible evidence that that happened. I sent it to my agent like, “I think she just offered me the job. But can you go find out if that's for real? Let's get that confirmation for sure.”

How much of a believer you are in “timing is everything” and “things happen when they're supposed to”? Because you've been acting for 17 years or so — is this a role that you would have or could have tackled 10 years ago?

I do believe in timing. Playing Nora…the making of this movie and getting to play her, I can't really adequately express… it is such an unspeakable honor and one of the most special experiences professionally of my life. Truy. It was definitely something that was done on the wings of all of the other ladies that I have gotten to play in the past. Years of doing comedy and doing improv comedy taught me so many things about pacing, timing, stamina, how to manage physicality — and doing stage work, doing theater, slumming away on the stage, sometimes for no one. All of those things really added up to this moment. I can't help but feel like it is cosmic. It does feel like in-yun. I feel like I have in-yun with the script, definitely have in-yun with Celine and with Teo and John, collectively. It's just wild — the three of us are so different and we have had such completely different professional journeys and lives leading up to the two years ago when we were filming.

I only know my own journey too. It's funny now at this point to hear from people like, “Oh my God, you really struggled. What's it like?” For me, I just feel as actors, you're never entitled to anything. It's tough out there. You have to really want it. And that's not to say being a woman and being a woman of color, being an Asian American actor, there's certainly challenges and limitations, limited opportunities because of the world that we live in. That's absolutely true. But I have really tried to make the best of it.

Nora is very driven and she is dedicated to her art and dedicated to making a name for herself. But, of course, curiosity and love and companionship are very strong magnetic forces. But Nora makes a positive selfish decision 12 years prior and she tells Hae Sung, “This [relationship] can't happen right now. I have to focus on me.” You rarely see characters make that kind of decision because it could stop the story cold in its tracks. As you were reading, were you worried about how things were going to progress from there? 

No, because from the beginning that's what was really exciting to me about doing this. This idea that it's not even really about a woman who's defined by who she loves and her back. It's more about her love of her own life. In a way, the greatest romance in this movie is not the one that she has with Hae Sung, nor is it with Arthur. It's the one that she has with her own life. Just thinking about that makes my skin tingle. I can really appreciate what that means as a modern woman, but just as modern people. Our lives have never been more expansive. It is possible to have a relationship with someone across continents. We can do that. We have the technology and the facility to do that, and yet we're still human beings living our lives. So I could appreciate that the movie almost starts at that moment when she says, “No, goodbye.” That, for me, is the beginning.

Do you think she actually had good intentions to reconnect sooner than later, when she told Hae Sung she needed to take a short break from them?

She probably was open to the possibility of it, but that, to me, is more a matter of youth. Like, what's it like to be a young person? And when your whole life is ahead of you, those kinds of promises hold differently within you because that does not seem like such a heavy load at that time because there's so much that's possible. Like, sure, yeah, let's pick up where we left off, new year. But we as adults know the inherent touch of tragedy in that because we know how, if you've lived a life, you know actually what's likely — with time passing, with different people coming in your life, and different jobs you end up taking in different cities. It's like an algorithm. So it's that innocence of, “Yeah, I'll see you later.”

Did Celine keep you and Teo apart until that day in the park when he first comes to New York, or did you get to meet and have rehearsals, anything like that?

So, she had asked that I keep the two guys separate from each other. So, the moment when they meet in the film [in the apartment], that's actually when they're meeting in real life… She ended up using the actual take. That is when John and Teo, the actors, were actually meeting for the first time. I love that that’s what's in the movie because our preparation for this involved my creating a completely distinct and separate world with each of them. I had to do that free of the other one. Celine would ask me to talk about each of the guys to the other guy so that the only thing they would know about each other was through me — I would be the conduit. It was slightly sadistic on Celine’s end. [Laughs] I mean, I can't pretend that I didn't also somewhat enjoy myself because I would — I was asked to do this, in my defense — but I would do some days of rehearsal with Teo, and John would ask, “How's it going?” And I’d say, “Wow. Teo. Teo Yoo. What an incredible performer. Like, what instincts. My God.” And John asked, “Okay, so he’s really handsome but, like, was he funnier than me?” [Laughs] And Teo is asking about John likewise: “How good of an actor is he?” It was great. And then that day ended with us going back to the trailers after they finally met and I think we had some beers and made it official.

The other piece of this was, Teo and I weren't allowed to make any physical contact up until the scene where we're reunited in New York. 

The hug. 

The hug!... Celine was interested in this idea of just not letting us touch. It sounds almost more explicit than what it really is but just no hugging and no handshake or pats on the back, nothing physical up until that day. And we looked at all kinds of things to get ready for that day in terms of physicality — it's really about the physicality of falling in love. 

I’m thinking about the force of Nora's hug. It's such a tight embrace and it said so much. But now knowing that there are so many more layers to that, it makes me a bit emotional. 

We watched Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present video, the performance art piece where she's sitting at a table and she invites various people to sit across from her one by one, and then really unexpectedly, her ex-love shows up. We watched that and, facially, what that experience is. We watched Korean dating shows, missed connection dating shows. It's so fascinating because we have this idea in our heads that the act of falling in love is this beautiful, gorgeous thing, but it's actually incredibly humiliating. [Laughs] It's such an exposing, possibly the most vulnerable, experience your body can undergo physiologically. I remember I was watching this Korean dating show where childhood sweethearts were reconnected, much like the movie, and the woman in a 10-second track, I would pause and if you followed each of the freeze frames, it was 10 different emotions: the initial shock, horror, grief, ecstasy, and embarrassment. It is so fascinating. So we had that in the back of our minds that day and, hopefully, it amounted to a pretty nice hug. [Laughs]

The big scene near the end when Hae Sung leaves, was it in the script how far Nora would walk or was that just circumstance of where cameras were able to set up and everything? I ask because that long walk is just so emotionally agonizing as you're watching, wondering, How is she going to react? What is about to happen?

The way that it was written, Celine was decisive in terms of the amount of time all of those things would take. The way she described the amount of time, for instance, it would take for them to stand with each other. “The Uber arrives.” In the script, it said that it should feel both like an eternity and also like a blink of an eye. It should have that sense of, like, this is torture, it is going on forever. And then also, before you know, it's over. Which is sort of an essence of life. That's the quality of living that we are after. Shooting that, Teo and I didn't know when the Uber was actually coming, and the way that last scene was shot was a single tracking shot. We were shooting on 35-millimeter, which was such a cool experience and also a lot of pressure with this movie. [Laughs] We really did not have a lot of takes and that sense of urgency, when you're thinking, “Okay, this [film] reel is 11 minutes. Here we go.” But we shot it in one tracking shot from the brownstone with Nora saying goodbye to Arthur and walking with Hae Sung and saying goodbye to Hae Sung with the Uber arriving, and then Nora walking alone and starting to cry and reuniting with her husband. That was one of the hardest days. The process of doing it, I will never forget and it will go down in the books for me as one of the most truly special things I've gotten to do.

You can hear EW's full interview with Past Lives star Greta Lee on the latest episode of The Awardist podcast, below.

Get the latest awards season analysis and hear from the actors, creators, and more who are contenders this season on EW's The Awardist podcast, hosted by Gerrad Hall. Be sure to listen/subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, or via your own voice-controlled smart speaker (Alexa, Google Home).

Oughta Get a Nod

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem for Best Animated Feature

In an Animated Feature race expected to be dominated by Spider-Man, Hayao Miyazaki, and a couple hopeful contenders from Disney, one unlikely underdog deserves serious recognition: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. The reimagining of the beloved reptilian warriors, from writer/producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, emphasizes the youthfulness of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello, who are all voiced by teenage actors with impeccable chemistry. The core cast often improvised dialogue in the recording booth together, organically capturing Gen-Z affect, slang, and spirit. Mutant Mayhem also boasts the most creative, unique animation aesthetic from an American studio since the original Spider-Verse in 2018, emulating that film’s sense of boundless possibility and overwhelming energy without ever feeling like a knockoff or a tribute to it. Its vibrant New York atmosphere is full of gorgeous detail and bizarre background players in every frame, and it combines disparate textures to create a computer-animated movie that looks like it’s made of clay, sloppy paint strokes, and notebook scribbles. —Wesley Stenzel

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Oscars Flashback

The Snub That Still Hurts

Cary Grant in Notorious

Though Cary Grant received an honorary Oscar in 1970, he remains one of the Golden Age stars whose lack of a competitive win still stings. He was nominated twice (in 1942 for Penny Serenade and in 1945 for None But the Lonely Heart) but never won. Arguably, his greatest performance was the persona of Cary Grant itself, but it’s his work in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious that seems the most overlooked. As CIA agent Devlin, he subverts his elegant charm into cold professionalism. He’s swoonily romantic in his love affair with Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) but forced to project a brittle cunning as he prepares her to wed another man in a honeypot scheme. The audience — and Alicia — is never quite sure of his intentions, whether he truly loves her or will surrender her to the wolves. It’s this that gives Notorious Hitchcock’s signature suspense, as Grant swirls together his debonair sheen and working-class upbringing to keep us guessing until the final moments. Grant is the key to the film’s success, and his willingness to poke at his persona offers up a deceptively complex performance that might be his best merging of man and movie star. —Maureen Lee Lenker

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