Speaker
Greta Lee
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Greta Lee estimates she ran approximately 13 miles during a single night shoot for Tron, sprinting repeatedly along a pier, which shut down production the next day when she couldn't walk.
Greta Lee worked on and off for roughly five years at David Chang's Momofuku restaurants in New York, where she was the hostess and was 'basically encouraged to be mean.'
At Momofuku, Greta Lee would tell walk-in guests a four-hour wait time, which functionally meant the restaurant had no intention of seating them.
Greta Lee grew up speaking Korean as her first language in Brooklyn's Canarsie neighborhood, developing a Korean-Brooklyn hybrid accent before attending ESL and speech therapy.
Greta Lee won the Bach Festival and conducted a children's choir in middle school, training as a classical/opera singer before pivoting to theater and acting.
Greta Lee initially turned down her iconic role in Russian Doll because she didn't know how to say the same line repeatedly — asking if they could just shoot it once and reuse the take.
Despite her widely lauded performance in Past Lives, Greta Lee was not nominated for an Academy Award — a fact she says 'no one even knows.'
Past Lives was the first time Greta Lee had ever been the number-one name on a call sheet, and also her first major dramatic realism role after years of comedic and improvisational work.
In the West End play La Bête with Mark Rylance, set in 16th-century France in iambic pentameter, Greta Lee's character could only speak words that rhymed with 'blue.'
Greta Lee has two sons — Apollo, age 9, and Raph, who just turned 7 — and describes herself as intensely dedicated to getting them outdoors every day, which she says explains her tan.
Greta Lee plays the main new villain in Toy Story 5 — an iPad named Lily Pad — and says the film made her cry six times during a single screening.
Greta Lee's first professional acting job was a Law & Order: SVU episode about incest, which she says performed so well it generated strong residual income — much to her complicated feelings.
Greta Lee was the hostess at David Chang's Momofuku and was 'basically encouraged to be mean.' Telling walk-ins they'd wait four hours wasn't a time estimate — it was a polite way of saying the table was never coming.
Performing a drowning scene means actually choking, actually swallowing water, and actually suffering — and the better you are at it, the more you'll be hired to do it again. Greta Lee's rule: don't be good at things you don't want to do.
The hardest part of Past Lives wasn't speaking Korean on camera or carrying the film — it was learning to sit in silence without making a joke. Greta Lee's survival mechanism is improvising. Céline Song needed her to stop.
Celebrity chef Alison Roman regularly pipes up at butcher shops to save strangers from terrible grilling decisions. Eight out of ten times, they are completely uninterested. She compares it to being a doctor on a plane who nobody asked for.
Greta Lee grew up speaking Korean in Canarsie, Brooklyn, won the Bach Festival, conducted a children's choir without being asked, acted in iambic pentameter on the West End, and worked a restaurant floor for five years — all before anyone knew her name.
Greta Lee performed La Bête on the West End alongside Mark Rylance. The play was in iambic pentameter, set in 16th-century France, and her character could only speak words that rhymed with 'blue.' This is an actual thing that happened.
Greta Lee said the iconic Russian Doll birthday line the way she said it once, immediately recognized it was the right read, and had to reproduce that exact version for every subsequent take across the entire series — whether she felt it landed perfectly or not.
Greta Lee's mother saw a photo of LACMA hosting the Dior Cruise show and texted it to her daughter without a word — an announcement, not a question. Her father came too because it wasn't fair otherwise. They grabbed every blanket they could find.
On the set of an Amy Poehler pilot with Rita Moreno, Greta Lee received unsolicited phone-usage feedback from the Hollywood legend — and says she thinks about it to this day, even though she barely considers herself phone-addicted.
During the Sisters shoot, supporting cast members — including Kate McKinnon, Bobby Moynihan, and Greta Lee — were housed in tiny plywood boxes on a soundstage built around a fake sinkhole that began to smell and decompose. Nobody asked them to do anything for weeks.
Greta Lee ran an estimated 13 miles in a single night on the Tron shoot, sprinting repeatedly along a pier. She shut down production the next morning because she literally couldn't take a single step.
Greta Lee spent roughly five years working the Momofuku restaurant floor while bouncing in and out of acting jobs. That extreme multitasking — being 'in the weeds' every night — is exactly what performing on set demands, just with a different kind of chaos.
Greta Lee initially said no to Russian Doll. She couldn't imagine saying the same line over and over — she literally asked producers to just shoot it once and reuse the footage. She said yes anyway, and the line became one of TV's most memorable resets.
Analysis
What they talk about
- TV & Film 63%
- Society & Culture 37%
Connections
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