Greta Lee in Past Lives: Acting Across Distance
Greta Lee's accounts of preparing for Past Lives reveal how silence, distance and her relationships with fellow actors shaped the role.
A reunion after decades apart sets the scale of Past Lives, Celine Song's 2023 debut feature. Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro lead the cast. The A24 synopsis centres on childhood sweethearts spending one week together: a brief encounter carrying the weight of a much longer separation. Lee's part gives that tension a human focus, as the memory of a relationship meets the person who has lived beyond it.
From Maxine to Nora
Lee was already familiar to viewers of Russian Doll as Maxine, Nadia's eccentric best friend. Netflix's April 2022 character guide describes a woman drawn to performance art and conspicuous personal style, whose loyalty holds even when she cannot understand what is happening to her friend.
The role combines a distinctive presence with a clear place in another character's life. Maxine's tastes make her immediately recognisable, while her support for Nadia gives that personality an emotional purpose. The same Netflix profile situates Lee among the casts of Girls, New Girl and Inside Amy Schumer, documenting the comedy work that preceded Past Lives.
Moving between these roles involves more than a change of genre. Timing, emphasis and the amount a character reveals all affect how an audience understands her. Nora places those decisions within a sustained encounter with the past, where recognition and uncertainty can occupy the same moment.
The work inside a pause
In an April 2023 Vogue interview, Lee described the vulnerability of playing Nora and the difficulty of adjusting comedy's instinct to fill space. Her character is a New York playwright, caught between feelings for Hae Sung, her childhood sweetheart, and her commitment to Arthur, her husband. The account makes restraint a practical acting challenge: Lee had to reconsider how much she needed to do for an emotion to register.
A June 2023 Entertainment Weekly interview describes another part of that preparation. Lee and Yoo began as strangers and had to suggest a shared childhood through listening and silence. Song asked them to avoid touching until their characters embraced in the film. Lee initially resisted the exercise, then found it changed her understanding of longing. Their first embrace as Nora and Hae Sung was also the actors' first.
The exercise links an abstract feeling to a physical condition. Distance becomes something the performers must negotiate before contact can occur.
Cities and versions of a self
Song's June 2023 note about the film identifies her own life as its inspiration. She connects first love and growing up with the lives a person has not lived, and with the places that hold different versions of that person.
Her account gives those ideas a geographical shape. New York is the city she moved to in 2011 to become a playwright. Seoul was once home; she returned in 2021 to make the film. Toronto holds much of her childhood and early adulthood, while Montauk also appears in the story.
For Song, these locations connect memory to physical distance. That perspective clarifies what is at stake in a reunion: the person who returns also remembers someone the other has ceased to be. An encounter can revive that earlier identity while exposing how much has changed.
This personal history belongs to the filmmaker. Lee's role is to make Nora a fictional person with attachments and commitments of her own. The distinction leaves room for performance within a story drawn from lived experience.
A role shaped through relationships
Hae Sung and Arthur know different versions of Nora: the child she was and the adult she has become. Her relationships carry different histories into the same encounter.
Such a role asks an actor to maintain continuity while responding differently to each partner. A character's earlier attachments and present commitments can remain credible together; the performance need not turn either relationship into an explanation for the other.
Lee's task brings those times and relationships into a single character. The week at the centre of Past Lives gives the reunion a boundary. Within it, a familiar person can seem close again, while the years that separated them remain part of the encounter.
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