The Incredible, Adaptable Greta Lee

If you know Greta Lee ’05, you know she’s a bit of a shapeshifter, with acting roles that span from the dead serious to the drop-dead hilarious. 

When we connect in late spring, she’s in Vancouver, British Columbia, hard at work on her next film, Tron: Ares. Somehow, between motorcycle stunts and line readings with co-star Jared Leto, she finds time to chat — even though a nap is more enticing. Despite her exhausting day, Lee is decidedly chipper.  

She’s sunny and self-deprecating when she reflects on her Northwestern days. And then, moments later, the shapeshifter emerges, and she’s resolute as the conversation turns to her experiences in Hollywood and her incessant pounding on the industry’s glass ceiling. 

If you don’t know Greta Lee, here’s a quick primer. For almost 20 years she has thrived in supporting roles on some of TV’s biggest shows, such as Russian Doll and The Morning Show. It’s not that she’s avoided the direct spotlight. It just never shined on her. 

“As time passed, there was this uncomfortable realization that, ‘Oh, I’m not going to get leading roles. They don’t exist for someone like me,’” Lee says frankly of the racial and gender bias she has experienced in the industry. In the years following her Northwestern graduation, she says, “I realized, I will fall behind if I don’t find my way.” 

Her way came in the form of secondary roles — the quirky friend, the spoiled rich girl, the young tech entrepreneur. Yet even playing the sidekick, she demanded viewers’ attention with her punchy one-liners and laidback deliveries. And for a while she felt content with the career she’d built. 

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, came Past Lives — the highly praised and Oscar-nominated film that placed Lee center stage. 

In the 2023 release, Lee plays Nora, a South Korean immigrant who is happily married and living in New York City when she reconnects with her childhood sweetheart after decades apart. It’s a softspoken love story, heavy in chemistry and resulting despair. Lee earned Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice Award nominations for her performance, and some say she was snubbed at the Oscars. 

Nevertheless, Past Lives ushered in a new stage of Lee’s career. Now she knows what she’s been missing. 

“I am in shock over how much has changed in the past year, especially in terms of the material I’m now getting my hands on,” she says. “Of course, there’s always that fear that Past Lives was it. But that’s a constant fear for all actors: ‘Will I ever get a shot again?’” 

Lee grew up with her two younger siblings in the shadow of the Los Angeles Hollywood sign. From the beginning, she took herself extremely seriously as an artist — even the shows she put on in the family living room came complete with professional-style programs. 

“I had a lot of moxie as a kid,” says Lee, who trained in dance and singing and insisted on entering every local talent show to showcase her skills. “I was the picture of a very intense child.” 

The daughter of South Korean immigrants, Lee had to adapt to various environments — from her immigrant community to her predominately white school. She quickly mastered how to code switch. 

“Being an immigrant,” Lee says, “you almost take on the qualities of a spy. You have to see what kind of environment you’re in, how to exist in a room — and that is constantly changing. Being a person of color really suits being an actor. You learn how to shift, sometimes subtly but sometimes drastically. You’re thinking, ‘How do I become more American or more Korean?’ as the situation demands. Those experiences filled in some of the holes in my training as an actor.” 

Lee’s grandfather Yang Ki provided a different kind of training, introducing Lee to silver screen classics. Because Ki was diagnosed with polio, he was exempt from fighting in the Korean War. So instead, he painted movie billboards at a U.S. Army camp in Busan, South Korea, where he gained an appreciation for the golden age of Hollywood. “He taught me about the Hepburns and Gone With the Wind — all the classics,” says Lee. 

While she learned about films from her grandfather, she gleaned musical instruction from Mariah Carey. “I had a cassette tape of her song ‘Hero,’ and I would sing it until my throat bled,” the actor recalls. “Music was a big part of my upbringing.” Her mother was a concert pianist, and her medical practitioner father was also a musician. 

After graduating from Los Angeles’ Harvard-Westlake School in 2001, the audacious teen considered The Juilliard School for her formal education in music and acting. But Lee worried that environment might fail to provide a well-rounded education that would prepare her for the real world. Instead, she enrolled in Northwestern’s School of Communication, venturing to the Midwest for the first time. “I remember taking out a map and trying to find Illinois with my parents,” Lee says with a laugh. “I wanted to become a person of the world. So I went to Northwestern and made friends with people from Sheboygan, Wis. — and it changed my life.” 

In Evanston, Lee found “a beautiful balance between college life and Chekhov.” She joined the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, dabbled in art history and got serious about miming for a minute. She dove into musical theater, joining Waa-Mu and Dolphin Show productions. She took acting classes with TV and stage actor David Downs and vocal lessons with opera singer Marie Michuda ’92 CERT, a former senior lecturer of music performance studies. 

“Greta had a strong, clear sense of who she was, and she brought it to all of her work,” Downs, associate professor emeritus in service, says of the college-aged Lee. “She was just as at home with comedy as she was with drama. She could see the ridiculous just as powerfully as the tragic.” 

At the time, though, it was the latter that appealed to Lee. “I wanted to be a real stage actor, like James Earl Jones,” Lee says. “I’m making myself sound unbearable, but I really was like, ‘I’m gonna be Meryl Streep.’” 

Those lofty aspirations would prove hard to reach, especially for an Asian American woman in the early 2000s. She recalls feeling “deeply uncomfortable” at times at Northwestern, “getting boxed out of opportunities and having to convince people to take me seriously,” she says. “I felt limited.” 

For her breakthrough role in The Waa-Mu Show, Lee remembers being cast as an Asian woman with a thick accent. “I was doing the calculus in my head, like, ‘This is acting, and I stand by it, but it’s also questionable that this has to be my way in.’” Looking back, she wishes she had advocated more for diversity in the theater program. But “it can be hard to be a spokesperson,” she says.