Greta Lee Thought Someone Else Would Get Her Breakout ‘Past Lives’ Role [Interview]

We’ve got almost six months until the nominations for the 2024 Academy Awards are announced and a lot can happen over what is almost always a bumpy awards season road. Still, it is hard to imagine there being five other performances more worthy of a Best Actress nomination than what Greta Lee has pulled off in Celine Song‘s new drama, “Past Lives.” In the right timeline, she should be an absolute lock for an Oscar nomination.

READ MORE: “Past Lives” director Celine Song is already excited about her next A24 film [Interview]

Told essentially in three chapters, the A24 release centers on two young Korean kids, Nora (initially Seung Ah Moon) and Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim), who see their lives go on divergent paths when the former’s family moves to North America. The pair (now portrayed by Song and Teo Yoo) find each other with the advent of Facebook in the late ’00s, but finances and work commitments limit their reunion to a frustrating Skype relationship. Almost another decade later, Hae Sung travels to New York where Nora is now married (John Magaro) and has an established career. The film reflects on the lasting connection of “soulmates” and the choices we make along the way.

A Los Angeles native, Lee is best known for her roles on “Russian Doll” and “The Morning Show.” During an interview with The Playlist earlier this month, Lee admitted she never thought she’d be in consideration for this sort of role (she doesn’t speak fluent Korean) and these sorts of prestige opportunities rarely come her way. Following the film’s debut at the 2023 Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals, massive critical acclaim, and, likely, a long and prosperous awards season, she should expect more of these opportunities heading her way.

One of the more remarkable aspects of “Past Lives” is Song’s decision to film the movie essentially “backward.” Most movies and television shows shoot out of order, but Song specifically chose to capture the in-person reunion of Nora and Hae Sung first, then their digital reunion, and, lastly, the Korean sequences with the younger actors. Lee admits that finding that initial chemistry with Seung was challenging, but having to capture their meeting over Skype was “really stressful.”

“I mean, the whole idea that you have to convey chemistry. I mean, they have to fall in love again over this format. As an actor, of course, it’s terrifying,” Lee says. “This is a three-inch plexiglass wall, basically between two performers. And for us to, we really had to reach to our full tool belts of whatever our capacities as performers to do that, to penetrate that plexiglass, so to speak. But at that point, because we were shooting out of order, we had already done the adult section of it, and I’m really grateful for that shooting order and the foresight Celine had, because we did it in reverse almost, like we had built our adult connection. I’d gotten to know him on such a deeper level, and we were able to create our dynamic that then going back to childhood helped us on a technical level. It did because I knew him better. And we were able to tap into what that feels like to see someone appear like a mirage.”

Over the course of our conversation, Lee reveals her thoughts on Method acting, and much, much more.

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The Playlist: Congratulations on the movie.

Greta Lee: Thanks so much.

When the script came your way, what was your initial reaction to it?

I thought, “Oh, my God. Someone else is going to be really lucky to play this.”

Why did you think that?

I had no intention ever to do anything in a different language, I mean, let alone Korean. I’ve been really proud of the work I’d done previously, but this is just a space that I’ve wanted to belong in for so long, and I honestly thought that’s just not going to happen in my lifetime to take on something like this and to be able to do something in a more kind of naturalistic acting style, it’s more akin to realism. I was like, “Oh, enjoy, somebody else,” and felt kind of heartbroken. And yeah, I’m still completely stunned that things have turned out the way they have on multiple fronts.

You were impressed by the screenplay, but Celine is still a first-time filmmaker. Were you concerned about that at all?

I mean, as soon as you meet her, all you have to do is meet her to know that, that woman knows what she’s doing and she knows what she wants. It was really humbling for all of us. We all stepped up in order to meet her assuredness, and it was really refreshing, even more refreshing to have someone who, this is their debut. To have that extreme sense of decisiveness and this unburdened confidence in terms of exactly how she wanted to tell her story and in a way that really forced all of us to get on the bandwagon, and let’s go. Let’s do it. And put everyone, our whole cast, those two amazing guys and our crew, everyone had so much skin in the game. I mean, she really demands that from you in this incredible way. And it did feel like we were a basketball team all in the name of telling an unconventional love story. We really felt that way, making it.

When I spoke to Celine she mentioned that she intentionally didn’t shoot any chemistry tests with you and Teo. Did you guys have time for any rehearsals or was it just figuring it on set?

We did. We had time for rehearsals. I remember when he walked in, he’s so unattractive, just really hard to look at. [Laughs.] But I remember feeling like, “O.K., we’re going to have to very quickly establish a long-lasting, deeply rooted connection that spans multiple decades. A childhood soulmate. How are we going to accomplish that in a realistic way?” And Celine had actually asked us to not touch each other, which sounds like a lot more illicit than what it [was], but she asked us to hug a lot and we were constantly hugging [her] all the time. And she said, “I can touch you guys, but you are not going to make physical contact until we actually do in the movie.”

And I think initially to us, that felt kind of silly almost because I don’t identify as any sort of method actor at all. And this idea, it just felt like, “Well, what’s the big deal?” But in doing that, I am grateful we went along for that experiment because it created a sense of longing and it did make us hone in on the biology of chemistry. What is that? When you’re not allowed to, and if Nora in this case, wasn’t able to make any sort of physical contact with Hae Sung over many, many years. And if she’s finally in his presence, what would that feel like? And I’m happy. I mean, I feel like all that not touching amounted to a pretty good hug, I guess.

When you read the script, did you feel as though Nora was meeting up with him solely to catch up with an old friend? Or did you feel as though in the back of her mind she was thinking, “I had so many feelings for this person. Who knows what could happen?”

Yeah. I don’t know. I feel like in my imagination, I was just thinking about that certain feeling. Certain people in your life can act as a mirror to the parts of yourself that only they hold because it’s a hologram to a very specific time in your life where you were maybe in a totally different place. And there are those people where maybe just thinking about them creates some sort of electric charge or maybe an ache or a longing or something. We all have those people. And so I think that Hae Sung does hold that place for her. But what I loved about this was trying to paint the full spectrum of the experience of someone who was a fully formed adult though. She’s happily married, she’s flourishing in New York City, and she’s incredibly ambitious. And then from that place to be struck by someone who has this impact on her. What that does was really fascinating to me. I feel like normally in movies like this, a woman is sort of flailing or a little lost. She’s trying to figure out what she wants out of her life and what she wants to do. And then she’s in this love triangle and she’s figuring out each guy can form a different part of her identity and create a certain life. And this was so not that, which I loved so, so much because it makes space for all kinds of other ideas in terms of destiny and love and just this universal idea that we all are going to die. The injustice of that, how do we make sense of that? And it’s so beautiful but supremely tragic. How do we make the most of our time here? You can’t have both. You have to choose. And that is something, it makes me tingly every time I even think about that because it’s just so true for everyone. There’s no way around it. Maybe we have these ideas to cope with that like reincarnation but maybe that’s just pure fantasy to cope with this just we’re all people here for a short amount of time, relatively speaking.

Absolutely. It is very profound in the best way possible. But from a technical point as an actor, you also have a huge chunk of the movie where you are acting opposite Teo on Skype or production-faked Skype. Was he in New York when you guys did this? Was it stressful? Perhaps that’s not the right word…

Yeah. Stressful is the right word. That’s the right word.

O.K. [Laughs.]

It was really stressful. Oh, yeah. I mean, the whole idea that you have to convey chemistry. I mean, they have to fall in love again over this format. As an actor, of course, it’s terrifying. This is a three-inch plexiglass wall, basically between two performers. And for us to, we really had to reach to our full tool belts of whatever our capacities as performers to do that, to penetrate that plexiglass, so to speak. But at that point, because we were shooting out of order, we had already done the adult section of it, and I’m really grateful for that shooting order and the foresight Celine had, because we did it in reverse almost, like we had built our adult connection. I’d gotten to know him on such a deeper level, and we were able to create our dynamic that then going back to childhood helped us on a technical level. It did because I knew him better. And we were able to tap into what that feels like to see someone appear like a mirage. But it was so hard. It was so brutal. I mean, yeah, it was glitchy. It was very realistically kind of Skype-like. We forget this [Zoom we are using] is such an improvement upon Skype is wild to me.

You just said you’re grateful now that you got to do it in that order, but before it shot, were you nervous about having that whole section being the first thing you guys did? Because when Celine told me, I was sort of surprised.

I mean, I’m not Method. Method is a cool privilege for someone else who doesn’t have two young kids and a full life to live.

Wait. Do you not believe in Method? Do you think it’s a real thing?

I think it totally depends on the person. I think for some, it is for each your own, you know what I mean? No judgment. Whatever floats your boat, whatever gets you there. Acting is a crazy, mysterious thing. Sure. But there were some things that, maybe it’s like passive Method. I don’t know. There were some things, some considerations, like shooting our last adult scenes. At the time, it was incredibly frustrating because you want to shoot in order you think because you don’t know, and you make all kinds of preparations, privately, and then only to arrive and you have to be willing to just risk destroying all of it. But yeah, what happened was when we first reunite, that feeling of, “I know you. I have my assumptions about you, but a lot of you is now a mystery.” All of those things were coming through in an excellent way, I think. For me, I wanted to not run away from that feeling, but sit in that discomfort as an actor we are deeply connected. We must be, we have to be because it says so in a script. But how are we getting to know each other again after decades? Similarly, we were matching that kind of reality, I think.

You were not part of the crew that went to South Korea and shot what is the first section of the movie. When you saw the final film what was your reaction to those scenes?

The Korea parts?

Yeah. In the context of the film.

I mean, it was even better than I’d imagined. And I was so pissed, by the way. I was like, “Oh, come on. Can’t we just rewrite some scenes, so Nora goes there?” Or we can cut away to, one of the final images of young Nora and Hae Sung. What if we did a magic realism thing where like adult Nora and Hae Sung? No, I love that. And Shabier Kirchner, our cinematographer, did such an incredible job. But this idea that this movie, it transcends time and space. So, showing Korea an ocean away in that fullness to match what was being shown for New York City was so essential to that feeling of, how can you cinematically portray the feeling of your soul [existing] in two different places? I was so stunned to see that manifest with the way they were shooting Korea. That it felt as real and tangible and specific as everything that was being shot in New York.

“Past Lives” is now in limited release and expands nationwide on June 23.