LOS ANGELES, June 19 (UPI) — Past Lives stars Greta Lee and Teo Yoo said that writer-director Celine Song forbade them to touch until their characters make contact in the film, to create a sense of longing.
Lee plays Nora, who left Korea as a child and now lives in New York with her husband (John Magarro). Nora’s childhood friend, Hae Sung (Yoo), gets a chance to see her when he visits New York 24 years after Nora left her native country.
“It’s human nature,” Lee told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. “If you’re told not to do something, it makes you think about it.”
Lee said that restraint led to “a very visceral understanding of what longing and physical chemistry is.”
Yoo said the scene in which Nora and Hae Sung hug after reuniting was the first time the actors hugged in real life. Yoo said the anticipation also aided his performance as a longing childhood friend.
“It built this tension of longing for each other,” Yoo said. “As actors you love to hug and be very physical. All of a sudden there was this buildup. I remember having these visceral feelings, my heart pounding out of my chest and sweaty palms.”
Yoo went even further in his preparation to develop physical manifestations of Hae Sung’s tension. He practiced tying a rope around his arms, so he would remember how it felt to hold his elbows stiff.
“So, I would always be stiff and tight, as if to show that he has repressed emotions,” Yoo said. “You see through his body language that he’s slowly emotionally opening up and revealing himself.”
Lee said it also was rewarding “to be able to play a normal woman” in Past Lives. She has worked steadily in comedies like Russian Doll and Sisters and dramas like TV’s The Morning Show, where her characters service plots centered on White women.
Lee said she never expected a film to focus on an experience to which she related as a Korean American. Lee said even speaking Korean with Yoo in New York City allowed her to express a side of herself she often hides in English-speaking culture.
“I never expected to be asked to even show this part of me, not to mention in service of a greater, universal story that is just about love,” Lee said. “It felt like I was always finding a side door in, in terms of these wonderful women that I’ve gotten to play in the past.”
Lee said the increase in Asian writers in Hollywood has expanded the material available to Asian actors, but that many of those roles still focus on Asian-identity. Lee said Past Lives‘ Nora and Hae Sung felt like people missing each other regardless of their origins.
Yoo was born in Hamburg, Germany, and now lives in Korea. He learned to speak Korean third, after German and then English. He said he also related to Past Lives‘ depiction of longing because of his own longing to be accepted by German, Korean and English cultures.
Yoo said he can “feel like an outsider, a certain type of loneliness or melancholy. I’m happy that I could express that within the script.”
After Past Lives, Yoo filmed the series, The Worst Boy in the World, playing a detective who returns from five years in an asylum to solve a crime that is linked to his family and his own mental health.
As Lee returned to work on The Morning Show, on which she plays a producer, she said Past Lives inspired her to think of more ways in which Asian actors like herself and Asian creators can participate in Hollywood.
“It does set the bar tremendously high, honestly, in terms of what kinds of stories I want to tell and this ongoing fight to ensure that it’s more equitable,” Lee said. “What makes an American movie? It can be this.”
