Growing up, Greta Lee (“Past Lives,” “The Morning Show”) imagined singing like the Korean coloratura soprano Sumi Jo or the Tony-winning performer Heather Headley.
For her role in Kent Jones’s new movie “Late Fame,” about a group of downtown artists intent on resurrecting a forgotten New York poet played by Willem Dafoe, Lee began thinking about other stars she admires.
“I’m afraid that this kind of woman doesn’t exist anymore,” she said, naming Liza Minnelli, Isabella Rossellini and Marlene Dietrich. “It’s this very strong presence and force that is really unburdened by the considerations of social media and these sort of more earthly concerns of the internet.”
Lee took the plunge and went for it, performing “Surabaya Johnny” for a bar scene full of actors, mostly men.
“I really was taking my clothes off and just walking into the room and coming up with choreography, I guess you’d call it,” she said. “But it was great fun.”
In a video call from California, Lee — whose sci-fi thriller “The Last House,” about a family trying to leave their home, is also out this month — elaborated on pie crusts, growing her hair out and getting to know cities by bike. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Flowers
My mother has always loved flowers. I didn’t realize until much later that was a unique feature of my upbringing — how much we were surrounded by flowers, drawing and painting flowers, thinking about them, arranging them. My own relationship with flowers extends to pining for them and planting them with the hopes that I can have my own cutting beds of flowers that I can incorporate into my daily life.
Martha Stewart
I’ve become newly acquainted with Martha. She recently rereleased her “Entertaining” book, several decades after it was first published. And I’m really getting to appreciate what it is, why this was so impactful then and why it is so remarkable and remains iconic now. I mean, here she is, tending her garden in such a physical and athletic way in her short shorts. That’s how I do it.
Sculptural Silver Jewelry
I’m very minimal when it comes to jewelry. There is a Korean jeweler in Seoul and her line is called House of Shiffon. I visited her atelier and found that she is hand-making all of her pieces. And they’re just extraordinary.
Dongmyo Flea Market in Seoul
This flea market was unlike any place I’ve ever visited. The elderly people were dressed with old-fashioned traditional Korean elements — hanboks, they’re called — mixed in with a punk rock flare that I’ve never seen before. My jaw hit the ground.
Swimming in the Ocean
Because of the movie “The Last House,” I got scuba certified. And I now have a profoundly different relationship with the water. I underwent some pretty extensive training in order to film certain sequences, like breath holding and manipulating your body so you can deal with the pressure and just being able to comfortably exist in water for extended periods of time. I now get to use it for my vacations.
Music League
This app is sort of like fantasy football for music. It’s a shared mixtape, if you will, of songs submitted by a group of people to a prompt. All the songs are submitted anonymously and there’s a voting period. Then the results are revealed and you can see who submitted which song.
Biking
Growing my family in Brooklyn, I began biking not just for pleasure, but for transporting my young children. So now wherever I go for work, I bike, and that’s how I get to know the city.
Long Hair
I haven’t had long hair since I had children. Maybe there’s a certain taboo about having long hair as a mature woman. But whatever it is, I found myself deciding that I want to know what having long hair feels like at 43. My oldest son also has long hair and we are sharing the experience of luxuriating in our long hair together, which has been very fun.
Pies
Being Korean American, pies did not loom large in our household. It wasn’t until college that my friend Emily Fleischaker of Oklahoma City introduced me to this idea that you can have a pie and be very casual about it. My other friend Alison Roman has an incredible sort of pie-crust recipe for dummies that is foolproof and that I can just do from memory.
Being Alive
I came across “The Ordinary Miracle of Existing” by Alan Lightman in The Atlantic. He mentions the statistical likelihood of a person coming into existence by describing if you had a ruler [stretched] from here to Pluto, and if every inch on that imagined ruler represents the likelihood genetically of the sperm and the egg to come together to create an individual person, how incredible it is that you yourself exist. It ends with the Mary Oliver quote about how will you spend your one wild and precious life. That is something that I try to carry with me and impart to my own boys, too.
