The actor’s Northwestern years prepared her for the reality of Hollywood. By Carolyn Twersky
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.
In her quest to become a serious actor, Lee eschewed joining The Mee-Ow Show when many of her friends were signing on to the student improv and sketch comedy group. “I was disdainful of comedy,” she admits. Instead, Lee joined Captain Teabag — the band that played between Mee-Ow sketches — as a lead singer, much to the chagrin of her voice teacher, Michuda, who chided, “It’ll tarnish your instrument.”
But Lee couldn’t stay away from the comedy show — perhaps because a young Russell Armstrong ’06 drew her to those Mee-Ow rehearsals. Unlike Lee, Armstrong embraced the comedic vibes of the show. Lee was intrigued by Armstrong, who seemed to break every mold. While race was dictating her path, Armstrong, who is white, ignored expectations and joined Northwestern’s multicultural comedy group Out Da Box and Kappa Alpha Psi, a predominantly Black fraternity.
She recalls Armstrong approaching her one day after a Mee-Ow practice session. “He asked me out and tried to be cool about it,” she says, smiling. “He licked his lips and did an LL Cool J kind of thing.”
At the time, Lee was about to graduate and move to New York City. “I was not looking to engage for a lot of reasons,” she says. “But we began a friendship that just became really undeniable. We totally fell in love.” (Now married for 10 years, Armstrong and Lee have two sons and a handful of chickens at their Los Angeles– area home, where the couple moved in 2020 following years in New York City.)
Lee graduated in 2005 and headed to the Big Apple. (Armstrong followed a few years later.) Thanks to the theater department’s Senior Showcase, which introduces select graduating student performers to industry professionals in New York City, Lee landed the role of overachiever Marcy Park in the touring production and Broadway run of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, a musical comedy. She moved into an apartment in Manhattan with Northwestern friends and waited tables to make ends meet.
But time passed, Spelling Bee closed in 2008, and those serious roles she coveted did not come.
No stranger to rejection, Lee says her years in Evanston prepared her for the harsh reality of the entertainment industry. “I auditioned for the Northwestern a cappella group Melodious Thunk [now called THUNK] my freshman year, and I was devastated when I didn’t get cast,” she says. “But those experiences were so helpful. If I had gone to college somewhere less challenging, I would have been immediately destroyed upon graduating and moving to New York.”
So Lee adapted. She did commercials and took on every small role she could find. “I was taking every shot and wringing it dry, making the most of it,” she says. “If the door is not going to open for someone like me, what can I do?”
The answer? Keep knocking.
A small role in the 2011 off-Broadway play 4000 Miles caught the attention of writer, director and actor Lena Dunham, who created the role of Soojin specifically for Lee in her HBO show Girls. Then, at a Girls table read, Lee bonded with Amy Schumer, leading to roles on the comedian’s Inside Amy Schumer. Despite her best efforts, Lee was getting noticed for excelling in comedy, the genre she’d turned her back on for years.
“With comedy, you have the opportunity to really play with the character,” Lee says. “It’s an extremely heightened, athletic kind of performance.” She learned to appreciate that flexibility, in both the comedic and supporting roles that seemed destined to define her career.
“Often the supporting roles are the most colorful,” Lee explains. “That’s where you get to add that dynamism.” And she did just that, standing out as the headstrong tech entrepreneur turned executive Stella Bak in Seasons 2 and 3 of Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, making space among big hitters Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Jon Hamm and earning a 2024 Emmy nomination. In Netflix’s Russian Doll she’s Maxine, the fashionably fun friend with drugs at the ready, whose iconic, first-season line “Sweet birthday baby!” will likely follow Lee for the rest of her career.
But even though Lee worked alongside everyone from Tina Fey to Tilda Swinton, she still longed for a leading role.
Then Past Lives came — and went. Lee read director Celine Song’s screenplay and fell in love with the script, but Song thought Lee was too old to play Nora. (Lee was in her late 30s at the time.) A year later, Song reconsidered. The two chatted on Zoom, and Lee landed her first starring role.
Lee has said in past interviews that she doesn’t know if she can return to the world of supporting characters after feeling the power of playing the lead. “I stand by my words, but I also hate what I said,” Lee clarifies. “I meant I’m making a commitment to myself to try to step into the light.
“Now I know what has been available for other people. That’s something I’ll never take for granted again. Now I’m trying to continue with courage and keep raising my hand.”
Beyond acting, Lee has been working on writing and producing projects. “I’ve written and sold pilot scripts,” she says, “but the topics that really excite me come from perspectives that have not always been met with open arms.” Thus far, the projects she has pitched, many of which center around Asian American stories, have not made it to production.
Past Lives’ success, though, has proven to her that there is an audience for stories that center the Asian American experience, like the TV adaption of Cathy Park Hong’s book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, which was announced in 2021 with Lee attached as writer, star and executive producer, yet never got off the ground. “People will say, ‘That feels too niche,’ but Past Lives completely validated for me that you can have specificity of character and story and place and still connect with a wide audience,” she says.
Phil Yu ’00, co-author of RISE: A Pop History of Asian America From the Nineties to Now, agrees that Past Lives, as well as Lee’s newfound prominence, is proof of changing tides within the entertainment industry. “You don’t need a gimmick or hook to trick people into watching something about Asians,” says Yu, better known by his online persona, Angry Asian Man. “Past Lives is a quiet, character-driven drama. That concept constantly gets explored throughout Hollywood; it just almost never involved people of color in a meaningful way until recently.”
Still, Yu isn’t surprised that Lee has had trouble pitching Asian American stories, even with the success of Past Lives and the Academy Award–winning Everything Everywhere All at Once. “Asian American projects have proved their mettle on market, critical and audience levels,” he says. “But Hollywood is so risk averse, and they’re just leaving money on the table.”
So Lee, ever the chameleon, pushes on. She thrives in situations where she can test boundaries. That’s exactly what led to her role in the latest Tron iteration, a Walt Disney Pictures sci-fi film scheduled for release in 2025. Lee will play Eve, a video game programmer and tech company CEO — a large leap from the quiet force of Nora in Past Lives or the high-stakes drama of Stella in The Morning Show. “I always wanted to do something more physical,” Lee says of her decision to take the Tron role. “This is completely new for me, riding a motorcycle and running all night long. It’s thrilling.”
When it comes to choosing her projects nowadays, Lee insists she doesn’t have an agenda. “I’m mostly led by my own curiosity,” she says. That curiosity, and her ability — and desire — to adapt, is a hallmark of her career.
At the very least, it’s what pushed her to leave Los Angeles for the Midwest two decades ago, a decision she commends 16-year-old Greta for getting right. “I learned how to do a keg stand, became an excellent artist, got a husband and made some lifelong friends,” she says, thinking back to her Evanston days. “I think on some level, I feel annoyingly like the poster child for Northwestern at this moment.”
Carolyn Twersky ’18 is a staff writer at W Magazine. She lives in New York City.
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