“I said, ‘Oh, thank you very much. Here’s where I come in!’ ” Lee said
Sometimes what’s meant for you ends up finding you months later. In a new interview with Deadline, actress Greta Lee spoke about getting cast as Nora Moon for Celine Song‘s Past Lives almost a year after first being rejected from the role.
In the interview, Lee explained that she received a script in her email with the subject line “Korean: Do you speak it?” before she auditioned for Moon. She loved the script so much that she was “blinded by my own tears.”
“I put myself on tape — and I didn’t get the job,” she said, describing the news of not getting the role as a “bad breakup.” She added, “And almost exactly a year later, I got a phone call completely out of the blue asking if I remembered Celine Song, and would I be willing and able to meet with her that same day over Zoom?”
“I was so confused, but apparently the casting had gone another way and there’d been some changes creatively,” she continued. “They were looking for — and I love this — ‘older’ actors. I said, ‘Oh, thank you very much. Here’s where I come in!’ ”
With “no time to prepare,” she took the meeting and read some scenes with Song before she ended up getting offered the role that same day. “It has been a wild ride,” she said.
“My experience with becoming part of this project mirrors the essence of the movie, this idea of inyeon: destiny and connectivity,” Lee said. “I feel like the script and I were soulmates [laughs]. Celine likes to say she’s certain we were married in another lifetime, although I’m not entirely sure she means that completely in a positive way!”
Song spoke to Rolling Stone about the casting for the film earlier this year, saying she was “stuck on thinking” that the person who had to get cast needed to be in their late 20s.
“Then things shift as you get older, and I started to get a better sense of what the movie was. My options opened up a lot after that,” Song said at the time. She also explained that after Lee did the casting and read the lines in Korean like “a 12-year-old,” it cemented the idea that she was meant to be the lead role.
“That’s the contradiction that’s in all of us: We are both the kid we once were and the adult we are now. And that’s what I heard. It just opened everything up,” Song said. “Plus I knew you could do comedy, which meant that you could do anything. Like Adam Sandler.”
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A24’s Past Lives premiered at Sundance in January before its wide release in June. The plot is semi-autobiographical and inspired by Song’s own love story with her husband Arthur, played by John Magaro.
The film received five Golden Globe nominations, including for Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama.
