Last year, browsing Architectural Digest, Greta Lee came across a mention of a tiny house on a speck of an island along Croatia’s Dalmatian coast called Lopud: sun-drenched, tranquil, isolated. After a grueling five-month shoot for Tron: Ares, the new Disney blockbuster in which Lee has a starring role, she booked it for the following summer, hoping, somehow, the dates might work. Magically they did, and in July, after reaching the island via speedboat, she, her husband, and their two sons, ages six and nine, ascended the 160 steps to the house, which was surrounded by lush cypresses and citrus groves. At last, serenity. Seclusion. Anonymity. No call times, no reshoots, no meetings, no red carpets, no press—no Hollywood.
But then, shortly after Lee and her family settled in, the housekeeper casually mentioned that their neighbors on either side were none other than acclaimed filmmakers Ruben Östlund and Sean Baker.
“Nightmare!” Lee exclaims over lunch the following month. “I specifically sought out this place because of how remote it was. But I was then faced with this decision—am I going to go say hello?”
Well, did she? “Absolutely not! You choose that island precisely so that does not happen. In fact, I saw Ruben once—in my swimsuit—and literally turned and ran.” She chuckles at the memory. “It’ll be a funny story when I meet him.”
Which seems likely for this in-demand 42-year-old actor, who over the past two years has had no shortage of Hollywood experiences, observing them all with the bemused eye of someone who has encountered fame only after acting for nearly 20 years.
There’s also her talent for deadpan humor and sharp one-liners, skills she’s spent the past decade building a career on. Mostly she’s embodied varieties of 21st-century women in female-led comedies: the surly nail technician (Sisters), the woman who just can’t take a compliment (Inside Amy Schumer), the self-possessed art-world up-and-comer (Girls), the flamboyant downtown free spirit (Russian Doll), the unsettlingly youthful Upper East Side dermatologist (Broad City).
But it was 2023’s Past Lives that marked a turning point. Lee’s performance as Nora, a woman caught between present and past, earned her Golden Globe, Critics Choice, and Independent Spirit nominations. A surfeit of opportunities have followed: in addition to Tron: Ares, there is Kathryn Bigelow’s new thriller A House of Dynamite; a major arc for her network-exec character Stella Bak in the current, fourth season of Apple TV+’s The Morning Show; and the upcoming bittersweet indie drama Late Fame. It has all placed her in unfamiliar territory.
“None of this is expected,” she says. “And thank God it’s so different from what I imagined this career could be at this point. For women it was not guaranteed that you would continue to find any work in your 40s. That’s when you should go shut the door and lie down. But to have it be the opposite of that? I can’t pretend that it’s not incredibly confusing.”
Red carpets have provided another stage for Lee. Preferring the sculptural and dramatic—nothing traditionally pretty or cute or overtly sexy—she has become closely aligned with designer Jonathan Anderson, who exited Loewe this spring after 11 years to take the helm at Dior. Now a Dior ambassador, Lee will be a vital part of establishing Anderson’s vision for the French fashion house, auguring what’s sure to be a thrilling new era.
Things are on the up for Lee, I suggest, including her place in Hollywood. “Do I have a place in Hollywood?” she considers. “I don’t know, man. You’re catching me at a funny and maybe interesting moment, in that I have no idea.”
In person, Lee is unassuming. No outsize reactions, wild gesticulations, ostentatious flourishes, or loud impersonations. And it’s not apparent that anyone recognizes her at the Houston’s outpost in Pasadena, where she’s chosen for us to meet. Houston’s is a national chain, neither trendy nor chic, but Lee craves an American burger done right after spending the past few months in England on the Netflix sci-fi thriller 11817.
“There are far more interesting places to go to, but I like it here,” she concedes, settling into a booth washed in the chain’s signature low, warm lighting. “I find it weirdly comforting. Maybe it’s the suburban kid in me.”
Lee was raised in the picturesque Los Angeles suburb of La Cañada Flintridge, the eldest child of three, her parents immigrants from South Korea. Their home was filled with music, especially opera, and Lee credits her mother, a classically trained pianist, for instilling in her an “appreciation for beauty and art.” They attended performances of the Korean soprano Sumi Jo, whose albums were fixtures in the house’s CD players. With her mother’s encouragement, Lee sang, played piano, did modern dance, and painted. “Growing up, there wasn’t a lot of distinction between all these things,” she says. “That was just a natural part of our existence.”
As a child, Lee was inclined toward performing, and her parents supported it—but not unreservedly: They were satisfied with acting as a course of study only when she got into Northwestern. “My dad’s a doctor, so at one point, out of worry, he was like, ‘You could still become a doctor.’ He even said, ‘You could go into prosthetics because it’s kind of like sculpture’—left brain, right brain. He’d found a two-year program. I was so offended that he didn’t believe in me,” she says wryly.
But the early 2000s were a different time for actors who looked like Lee, and she saw scant stage time even in high school and college. “In those years, it was a really big question mark of whether I was going to make a living.” And that was paramount, as she was the first person in her family to go to school in the United States. “It was all about being successful in any way you could. And the expectations were high. I mean, school was not a casual thing,” she says. Attending the elite prep school Harvard-Westlake, she felt pressure to load up on Advanced Placement courses and notch a perfect score on the SAT (“I didn’t,” she quickly adds, locking eyes with me so I know she’s not being self-effacing). On a tour of MIT, her parents pointed at a theater-club flyer on a bulletin board. “They said, ‘See? You could do this.’ ”
Even she had trouble envisioning a sustainable career for herself, with a lack of professional role models. “That has always been a source of hurt—internalizing years of feeling like, Well, if the only model is something that I physically cannot fit into, what am I doing? Even now, that’s a huge struggle for me because those have not really existed.”
When Lee put herself up for Tron: Ares, it was her first audition in years. “I could barely tell you what a Tron was,” she says, but the role of Eve Kim, a gifted programmer drawn into a virtual neon-glowing world, “felt like the complete opposite of Past Lives, which was so naturalistic in its realism and scale. I wanted to try something different, and this character subverted a lot of expectations in terms of what she historically has looked and acted like.” The movie is the third installment of the Disney franchise that stretches back to 1982, but it overperforms, with dazzling visual effects, a sexy, throbbing soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails, and plenty of nostalgic ’80s details: floppy disks, pinball machines, Rubik’s Cubes.
“I just wanted to ride a lightcycle,” Lee confidently joked to a Comic-Con audience, but to me she resists the idea that she’s in her genre era, or in any era at all. “As an actor, you feel this external pressure to create this narrative for yourself, and I find it really annoying because it’s so antithetical to my job,” she explains. “My job requires me to stay firmly in touch with all different kinds of people. And it’s not about me.”
“Everything is set up so that the more success you have, the more isolated you become,” she continues. “What happens is—and I have seen this with peers—you get a little weird. You start thinking about yourself in an industry way. You become a product. I hate that, and I can see why it’s crazy-making and really damaging.”
She’s been ushered into exclusive airport lounges where she was offered caviar at the crack of dawn. In Paris this summer, she was assigned a bodyguard for the first time. “It was like, ‘At ease, sir. I got this. I am going to go to the museum.’ ” She understands the need for privacy and security but believes it’s overblown. “It’s a choice. If you don’t buy into it, it leaves you alone. And that’s key to doing my job. The more isolated you get, the more out of touch you are.”
That unease with the trappings of celebrity drew her to Late Fame, an indie drama directed by critic turned filmmaker Kent Jones in which a cadre of downtown bohemians rediscovers the work of a once-forgotten poet, played by Willem Dafoe. Based on an 1895 novella satirizing Vienna’s coffeehouse intellectuals, and adapted by May December screenwriter Samy Burch, it’s a gimlet-eyed look at creative legacy and the warping effects of artistic recognition. “That movie really hit everything I was feeling about where we’re headed, with art and how we consume things,” Lee says. “Obviously even the title is something I understand.”
“Anybody who’s followed Greta’s work knows that she’s funny,” Jones tells me. “They know she has a real concentration and intensity but also brings a vivacity and liveliness to anything she’s in.” Yet Late Fame displays her mutability. “The way that she’s shifting registers, dealing with a character who is giving a performance no matter the circumstances…. On the one hand, it’s big. On the other hand, it’s very subtle.”
“The thing I liked about her is that she wears nothing on her sleeve,” Dafoe says of Lee when reached at his farm outside Rome. “You don’t see her coming. I won’t say she’s exactly mysterious, because she’s quite direct and very easy to work with.” But, he confesses, although he enjoyed working with her, “I don’t really know who she is.” He intends that as a compliment. “It’s a beautiful thing because it keeps you in curiosity. You’re drawn to her, but you haven’t reduced her to a box. And that’s a talent.”
One memorable scene in Late Fame has her croon the cabaret torch song “Surabaya Johnny” to a room full of adoring older gentlemen, hearkening back to her musical-theater roots: One of her first acting jobs was the 2005 Broadway musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and she had childhood dreams of being Lea Salonga or Heather Headley. “I wanted to be a Broadway diva, like Patti LuPone—although,” she deadpans, “you can’t say Patti LuPone anymore.”
Lee sang and danced competitively from an early age. “Every time I do something, it becomes apparent how much people don’t know about me,” she says with a hint of exasperation. An upbeat Risky Business–inspired Calvin Klein campaign last year saw her shimmying in her skivvies, and even friends were shocked that she didn’t work with a dance coach.
It helps, of course, that she happens to be in the best shape of her life, as a self-described “Tracy Anderson addict” who can be found daily at the fitness guru’s studio along with a cohort of nonindustry women—including some pushing 60. “I look at them like, Why the fuck are you here?” She laughs. “I know why I’m here.… But you are crushing it! It’s changed my perspective. I want to be able to roll around like this when I’m 80.”
In other words, she’s going for it, in a voracious way. “I’m really greedy about life,” she says, finally tucking into her towering cheeseburger. “I am finding more, as I age, the privilege to be very selfish about what brings me joy. I want to squeeze life dry and milk it to the bone.” She’s even trying to convince her husband, comedy writer Russ Armstrong, to add to their family of four. “I don’t want to compromise.”
That includes cultivating an off-grid lifestyle as much as is possible in a place like LA. After 15 years in New York, she and her family decamped here in 2020 so she could join the second season of The Morning Show. They found a two-bedroom house in El Sereno, a historically working-class Latino neighborhood in East LA, on a hilly cactus-covered acre that had been used for grazing. “We were the New Yorkers who had to figure out how to exist within a Steinbeck experience,” she says. “We had no idea what we were doing. There’s snakes and coyotes. It’s like the wild, wild West.”
On the horizon, there have been discussions for her to do Closer on Broadway, the first time Patrick Marber’s unflinching modern classic will have been staged in the US in more than 25 years. And this summer came news that Lee will direct and write an adaptation of The Eyes Are the Best Part, Monika Kim’s 2024 psychological-horror novel, for Searchlight Pictures. “Working for so long as an actor, you learn a ton about directing,” she explains. “And it’s really personal—it’s basically about my family, which sounds insane because it’s also about a Korean American serial killer.”
The project calls for an Asian American lead, fulfilling what Lee describes, firmly, as a responsibility. “It is important for me to give someone the opportunity that I didn’t have, for several decades,” she says. “If I don’t—as I’ve experienced firsthand—it’s just not happening.”
After her sojourn in Croatia, Lee showed up to shoot her first Dior campaign at the Palace of Versailles, unkempt, with a deep tan. “I bet I looked like Matthew McConaughey in that movie The Beach Bum with a bongo drum—just the opposite of Lady Dior.”
But such is the spirit of her fashion idols—women like Twyla Tharp and Katharine Hepburn. “I would call them handsome women, who dress utilitarian and ready for action. I always like tailored, strong, very masculine women,” she says. On this warm summer Friday, Lee’s wearing an oversized blue chore coat, a thin light gray knit vest, and dark slacks. She’s luminous without makeup, her long straight hair falling across her shoulders. Outside of work, she says dryly, “I dress like Frances McDormand. It’s all functional stuff that can swing from gardening to going somewhere.”
She’s still adjusting to being a new face of Dior, long associated with a genteel sense of womanliness. “I’m in this campaign having to say, ‘Je suis Lady Dior,’ ’’ she says and smiles in disbelief. “I was laughing to the crew, saying, ‘I’m a lady? I’m not a lady. I guess I’m a lady?’ They wanted to use all of that, and show how complicated it is. Lady is such a loaded term.” She leans forward: “There are some very feminine pieces,” she says of Anderson’s work at Dior. “Like bows.” She half-whispers this, almost like a slur.
Lee and Anderson met when he dressed her for the 2023 Berlinale in a strapless scarlet Loewe dress on to which a similar cream dress was printed, and a knit mini with a matching exaggerated curved, flared top. She later became a Loewe global brand ambassador, appearing in several campaigns alongside a coterie of Anderson favorites.
“I just really like the guy,” Lee says of Anderson. “He looks and dresses like a frat boy, but he’s obsessive about vision and work in a way that I find incredibly appealing. And he’s not some manic artist, wildly creating on his own inside a cave where he’s only led by his own intuition. He’s so deeply connected to the world, everything from The White Lotus to an obscure Scottish painter I’ve never heard of whom he wants to bring to light again. It’s so exciting that he is now tasked with reinventing and putting his stamp on a preexisting template. And I get that—that’s what I feel like I have to do all the time.”
The Venice Film Festival marked the beginning of Lee’s new relationship with Dior—and the red-carpet debut of Anderson’s designs for the label. For the House of Dynamite premiere, she wore a plunging, ballooning dark green organza and black satin minidress—and at the front hem, one of those whispered-about bows. (In the film, Lee plays a whip-smart North Korea expert suddenly called upon by the White House when it detects an unidentified missile destined for the United States.) She also donned a demure tea-length black-silk skirt suit—Anderson’s version of Dior’s New Look—for the premiere of Late Fame.
Anderson instantly fell in love with Lee. “She is incredibly down-to-earth and knows how to have fun,” he says. “I adore dressing her.” He sees her as the epitome of a Dior woman: “extraordinarily talented, knows exactly who she is, and is willing to take risks with clothing.”
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When I catch up with Lee the week after Venice, she’s in her parents’ living room, seated at a piano adorned with family photos. She’s reeling from what she calls the “overwhelming” experience of debuting two films. And that Dior minidress felt to her like a third Venice project: “I want to say village, but it’s a small country, the people involved—tailors staying up all night to make it perfect.” Wearing custom Dior is a privilege she takes seriously. “I understand all the work and ingenuity and vision that went into executing that. I’m more of a Method actor when it comes to fashion than I am with actual acting.”
So in preparation, she listened to a lot of Maria Callas and recently watched the 1955 romantic comedy Summertime, in which Katharine Hepburn plays a staunchly independent middle-aged American who finds love visiting Venice. “There’s something about the vulnerability of being a woman immersed in this world that is so culturally and historically rich but feeling so like an outsider,” she says.
Her approach to premieres—where she’s also worn looks by Bottega Veneta, Proenza Schouler, Calvin Klein, and The Row—is an attempt to try to preserve that magical feeling of getting ready to go out as a teen. “When you’re young, there’s a tremendous amount of consideration, all connected to this excitement of possibility,” she says. “It feels like the world is infinite and anything could happen. I’m lucky that the people around me are old enough to understand we’re trying to recapture that feeling.” (For the past decade, she’s collaborated with stylist Danielle Goldberg, who also works with Ayo Edebiri, Kaia Gerber, and Olivia Rodrigo, as well as her longtime glam team, whom she calls “my Korean ladies,” makeup artist Nina Park and hairstylist Jenny Cho.)
These days, however, “everyone has their phones. You go to a party, and people pretend to sip Champagne while they film themselves. Everything’s branded and corporate and lame. No one knows how to have fun anymore.” But she grants that fronting campaigns (as she also did for Tiffany Co. this spring) “can be liberating and empowering for a woman like me, who’s all the things that conventionally were not considered the ideal.”
Lee, who never once pulls out a phone during our meetings and says she never looks at images of herself, describes a meme of how young people spent their nights out before smartphones: “pictures of people raging inside some sweaty bar, dancing. Being a millennial, I feel so genuinely privileged that I got to experience that. If I were in my 20s now and all this were happening, it would be totally different.”
Another cherished memory: visiting the local multiplex. “As a ’90s kid, that experience was everything, and I just wanted to get as close as I could to being part of that.” She’s in her memories now, a reflective mood, clearly still processing the events of the last couple of years. “There’s the capacity for life to just turn,” she says. “Your dream can’t stay exactly the same if the world keeps changing so dramatically around it. I feel very awake to that.” A grin curls at her lips. “Well, as long as I don’t keep getting brought into small rooms with caviar at six in the morning.”
In this story: hair, Holli Smith; makeup, Emi Kaneko; manicurist, Emi Kudo; tailor, Susie Kourinian for Susie’s Custom Designs.
Produced by Rosco Productions. Set Design: Jeremy Reimnitz.
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