G reta Lee is supposed to be in Paris. Instead, it’s a Sunday morning, and she’s in Cincinnati. She is wearing a white top and little makeup as we speak over video chat. Her flight was canceled the previous night because of an early nor’easter. She’s been in Cincinnati for a few weeks now, shooting her latest project, “Jonah,” directed by Danya Taymor. A brief production hiatus is allowing her to travel to Paris Fashion Week, where she’s slated to attend a Tiffany & Co. dinner and sit front row at Dior. Not to mention, Lee hasn’t been home to Los Angeles to see her kids in a few weeks. But these are the logistical problems faced by an international movie star like Lee. “If you have any solutions for me, I would happily accept them,” she says.
“International movie star” is a fairly new distinction for Lee, 43, who has been acting almost her entire adult life. By now, her meteoric rise to fame is old news. In 2023, she starred in Celine Song’s “Past Lives” as Nora, a New York-based Korean-Canadian playwright who, two decades after leaving Seoul, reconnects with her childhood sweetheart. There was something about Lee that captured the collective imagination. Perhaps it was her magnetic, casual beauty. Or how she expressed rippling layers of longing. Or the soulful way her Nora wondered about the life she might have had if only she had stayed in South Korea.
The nominations followed, as did the accolades, the magazine covers and more. Until then, Lee had mostly played what she calls “bit parts.” She was always a scene-stealer—anyone who watched the comedy series “High Maintenance” won’t soon forget her character Homeless Heidi—but “Past Lives” revealed an unmistakable depth and beauty to Lee, cementing her as a star. What came next was a different kind of career: a sprawl of genres that reads less like a strategy than an appetite, making up for lost time, from “The Morning Show,” “Tron: Ares” and “Toy Story 5” to Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite” and the horror film “The Last House.”
None of this, of course, has made the job any easier. “Jonah,” Lee tells me, very nearly slipped away. It’s based on an off-Broadway play that opened in 2024, and the script appeared after she had committed to “Tron,” so she had to let it go. “It was devastating,” she says. “I waited so long for certain kinds of opportunities to come. And as you may be aware, it all happened so late for me. Having to choose is a great problem to have.” Thankfully, schedules and timelines shifted, and the film found its way back to her.
Even though Lee grew up in La Cañada Flintridge, California, in the foothills north of Los Angeles, she never thought she would make a name for herself in Hollywood. She is one of three children of parents who immigrated from South Korea. Her father, a doctor, worked full time, and the family moved around a lot.
On paper, theirs was an artistic household. Her mother is a classically trained pianist who studied at the prestigious Ewha Womans University in Seoul, and her father plays the cello. But Lee is quick to complicate the picture. “My dad has now gotten so much, arguably too much credit for being artistically minded and his cello ability,” she says, laughing a little at herself. “He’s terrible,” she adds. “He is very bad at cello.”
Her mother, however, is “a capital-A artist in every sense,” Lee says, adept at everything from painting to singing to piano to cooking. “I mean, it’s really my mom,” she says. “She would take us to the public library and sit us down with a huge stack of books. She wouldn’t make us read them, but she would make us copy these incredibly beautiful illustrations from them with pastels.”
“It takes real courage to be a diva and perform womanhood in that way. It was very enriching for me.”
Lee applied early to Northwestern University, where she studied theater and art history. She had operatic training and enjoyed acting, but Hollywood never seemed like a real destination. “Even the idea of being an actor was like saying, ‘I want to go to the moon,’” she says. “That’s not possible. What an embarrassing thing to even dare to dream about as a kid.” It’s not surprising given the dearth of good or serious roles for Asian Americans in Hollywood, a topic Lee is refreshingly open about. In a 2024 interview with Vanity Fair, Lee commented on a scene in “Past Lives” in which Nora sits in a car, looking out the window: “I mean, we haven’t even really gotten to see an Asian American woman sitting in her car without her robbing a bank or getting killed.”
Instead of dreaming of Hollywood, Lee fantasized about finding her own bohemia. She wanted to be an artist. “That meant going to New York City,” she says. “I wanted to be part of something cool, which to me was just about finding a thing that was greater than me and something that I could really get behind in an authentic way. At that time I thought maybe I’ll be a singer or perform musical theater. I had no idea, but I just wanted to be artistic and have street cred. That was really important to me. That meant I had to leave L.A. In my mind, as a kid, there was no way I could achieve my artistic pursuits in Los Angeles.”
It’s a sentiment that reverberates in Kent Jones’ 2026 film “Late Fame,” which starred Lee opposite Willem Dafoe. Lee plays Gloria, a cabaret singer whose circle of young downtown artists rediscovers a forgotten poet, played by Dafoe. Lee lends Gloria a kind of old-world campy sensibility, with a Louise Brooks bob and dramatic makeup meant for a black-and-white camera. To prepare, Lee steeped herself in films from the first half of the 20th century, watching performances by Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Greta Garbo. “I had this very specific woman in my mind,” says Lee. “It was a risk, it could have been misinterpreted wildly. I explained it to Kent Jones, and he was completely on board. And I was like, ‘Wow, this is incredible. You’re going to let me do what I want with Gloria.’ In the end, I found it takes real courage to be a diva and perform womanhood in that way. It was very enriching for me.”
Whatever uncertainty Lee had about finding success as an actor, she never let it get to her. “Doubt was so inherent to what I have always felt my whole life,” she says. “It wasn’t a new feeling. It’s just built into my DNA. Ever since I was a child, I was told that I suck. That’s bad. I don’t even mean to be so flippant about it. And now that I’m much older and I have my own children, I can really see, oh my God, from the jump, I can’t believe how poorly the world was set up for this girl in terms of certain aspirations and certain expectations.”
For now, though, Lee is still hoping to make her flight to Paris. “God willing,” she says. Not that she’s in any hurry to leave Cincinnati. She loves it so much, “I’m running for mayor,” she jokes. She’s had the Skyline chili and the goetta, and she’s discovered a Wisconsin supper club in Kentucky, just a 10-minute drive away, over the Ohio River. “Even that sentence,” she marvels. “It’s a Wisconsin supper club in Kentucky, but I’m in Cincinnati.” Lee adds: “It feels so nice to be in America and to feel good about being American.”
Eventually, amid the sprint of shoots and shows and magazine covers (this one included), Lee will find time to pause and catch her breath. At home in Los Angeles, with her husband, Russ Armstrong, and their two children, she gardens. She and Armstrong collect seeds. “We like to do seed bombing,” she says. “We have our kids and my nephews and whoever. It’s nothing fancy. You just throw them everywhere, and you see what happens. And suddenly one day, you get to see a field full of lupines and poppies.”
Hair, Jenny Cho; makeup, Nina Park; manicure, Ami Streets; production, Casa Projects; postproduction, Last Post Studio.
