Greta Lee wanted to make an action film. There was just one catch

5 days ago 4

When Greta Lee was offered the role of Eve Kim in the fast-paced science fiction film Tron: Ares, she thought it would make a useful contrast to the film she had just finished making: Celine Song’s introspective and thoughtful Past Lives, a delicate study of friendships over the passage of more than two decades.

“I had just come off doing a very … intimate, small-scale movie, that was a much more naturalistic film,” Lee says. “It was realism, basically, and I was just curious to see if I could do action, and to be really physical, and take advantage of the youth that I have now, and really push that and see.”

So what happened? “I was sorry that I ever asked,” the 42-year-old Los Angeles-born actress says, laughing. “Because there is so much running in this movie. Really, nothing could have prepared me for that kind of running and that style of running, the running-for-your-life kind of running.”

Directed by Joachim Rønning from a screenplay by Jesse Wigutow, and based on a story by David Digilio and Wigutow, Tron: Ares is the sequel to Tron: Legacy (2010), and has connections to the original 1982 film Tron, about video game developers who become trapped inside the software they are writing.

In the new film, Eve Kim is the CEO of Encom, one of several companies searching for “the permanence code”, a piece of software that would allow programmable matter to remain in the real world permanently. The film also stars Evan Peters as Eve’s rival, Dillinger Systems’ boss Julian Dillinger, Gillian Anderson as Julian’s mother, Elisabeth, and Jared Leto as Ares, a super-intelligent program created by the Dillingers.

Tron: Ares has exquisitely beautiful visual sequences courtesy of cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, a stunning soundscape from the Nine Inch Nails and a challenging story that plays hard with action and sci-fi story tropes but also manages to ask some ambitious questions about AI and the future of computing.

“If this movie could provide or could be some sort of relic in terms of marking this exact moment in time, I think it does that only by asking questions about humanity and how it relates to AI and these huge technological advances,” Lee says.

“Even though it is about these themes, about AI in tech, it really is asking, well, what does it mean to be a person and how can we ensure that these advances can be human-centric?”

As a young kid growing up in Los Angeles as the child of South Korean immigrants, Lee did not see a lot of female action heroes on the big screen. There was Sigourney Weaver in Alien, and Linda Hamilton in Terminator. And in genre films, the now-iconic Michelle Yeoh, who went from Bond heroine to Star Trek villainess, and Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung.

But “growing up, I really didn’t see much in terms of people who look like me who were in action roles,” Lee says. “Linda Hamilton is someone who does come to mind and was someone I was thinking of during this process. And Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung, huge, huge influences.

“Just seeing that kind of physicality, [I was] so incredibly inspired by women who seem so fully embodied and are in their own bodies.”

As for turning herself into the kind of runner she needed to be to unleash her inner action heroine, Lee says she Googled videos of Tom Cruise in the multitude of movies in which he has been doing the running-for-your-life kind of sprint.

“Just to investigate what that form could be,” Lee says. “We had an incredible stunt team, and we had a lot of resources. There are all kinds of tricks that I learned.”

Like, what? “On camera, you can pump your arms in a way that is actually abnormally fast and exaggerated and take smaller steps [and] that will make you appear as if you’re running faster, especially if the frame is tighter on you,” Lee says, conspiratorially. “Things like that are very useful to know.”

But it also came down to a gruelling training schedule. “They gave me the guy, this ex-Navy Seal, this incredible man who trains all the Chris’s, and Brad Pitt, and me, and we got into it,” she says.

Lee and co-star Jodie Turner-Smith, who plays Athena, Ares’ second-in-command, ended up building hardcore physiques for the film, with one unexpected side effect: the costumes ended up hiding all their hard work.

“We were taking it really seriously, it was a big part of our prep, thinking about the physicality of these people, and then we did our costume fittings and realised we would be covered head to toe, helmet to boot, and nothing would be exposed,” Lee says.

“We had a good laugh about all the hard work going into creating these six-pack abs that you would never see,” Lee adds. “I even suggested maybe Athena and Eve have this physical fight [and] I offered to tear a rip that conveniently would expose Jodie’s gorgeous body ... but that didn’t happen.”

As for the film itself, it blends nostalgia and big-budget modern blockbuster with more ease than you might expect. It feels wholly digital, but dances through analog. And it subverts somewhat the film trope of good guys and bad guys: characters that initially seem like potential bad guys turn out to be something quite different.

“Finding that balance, it was just a surprise, honestly, to see it in the script,” Lee says. “It wasn’t what I was expecting in the same way that I never expected that I would be asked to be a part of Tron, but here I am, and I am pleased to say that it feels like we really did something that feels like it honours the spirit of Tron.

“We have a beautiful homage to Tron and the legacy of it, this decades-old franchise that has withstood the test of time, and yet, I think they did a gorgeous job of building upon that and having the story, the central heart of the story, [be] something that, I think, is deeply personal and hopefully can resonate with all kinds of people.”

Given Lee’s rich body of work in less futuristic environments, she is less accustomed to a green screen environment than many actors whose resumes are populated with films from the realm of Star Wars, Star Trek and Marvel. That said, Tron: Ares leans into physical sets and location filming in ways that the original did not.

The film also has an obligation to a very specific production aesthetic, which was established with the original Tron, a kind of blue-and-red-neon-lines/three-dimensional-vector-graphics vibe.

“The imagination is an incredible thing, and I feel like it is a rare privilege that it is my job to engage with it on a deep level,” Lee says. “This movie is the ultimate example of having to exercise just that ... [and] in terms of acting, it’s such a joy to go back to basics and to have to create your whole environment.

“That being said, we had these huge practical sets, and we were shooting so much on location, we had this incredible design team who built worlds around us too, so we had a mix of both,” Lee adds. “You can see it in the movie too. It feels tangible, all of these [environments] feel very real.”

Greta Lee and Billy Crudup in Morning Wars.

It is easy to imagine that a big-screen action epic like Tron: Ares is the making of an actress. But the truth is, the Greta Lee cultural moment that we find ourselves in right now has been a long time coming.

After an early career on the New York stage and in a raft of smaller roles, her work on Past Lives won her a Golden Globe nomination for best actress, and since 2021, she has starred in the Apple TV+ drama series Morning Wars, playing producer-turned-television executive Stella Bak.

As Stella Bak, in particular, Lee has given an emotionally dimensional performance to one of the most complex women written for television. Brought in to the struggling broadcaster UBN as president of news, Stella was a digital disruptor trying to fix a legacy TV mess.

In the third and fourth seasons, her ascendancy to the position of CEO of UBN put her in the cross-hairs of evolutionary change, with tech billionaire Paul Marks (Jon Hamm) knocking at the company’s door, a new board president, Celine Dumont (Marion Cotillard) and some spectacularly risky calls when it comes to her private life: an affair with Dumont’s husband, Miles (Aaron Pierre).

“I would love to say that I’m able to fall madly in love with each [character] and let it go, but of course, bits and pieces of them stay.”⁣

Each experience informs the next, she says.

“It does feel like I am in conversation with all of these women that I’m so lucky to play. I don’t have a casual relationship with all of these women from Eve Kim, to Nora Moon [in Past Lives], to Stella Bak, Gloria Gardner – that’s the woman that I play in a movie, Late Fame, that’s coming out – I hold them very dear and near,” she says. “But also, I do think that I have to clear them out to make space for … the new woman who’s going to enter into my life.”

And the little girl who struggled to find faces like her own on TV and film screens? The unanticipated intersection of her work is almost overwhelming, it seems. “How much time do we have? I still can’t believe that this is happening,” Lee says.

“It’s not anything that registers within my own house. I mean, I just dropped my kids off at school,” she adds. “But I am thrilled to be here. I don’t take any of it for granted. I think that this is amazing, and I am so happy that I get to do such a wide variety of things.”

Being able to fly to Korea to launch Tron: Ares was “one of those classic pinch-me moments”, she says. “I can’t say I never would’ve dreamed of it because I certainly had as a little girl. Sometimes life ends up better than you ever expected, and it’s worth the wait.”

The scale of the moment, too, is sometimes difficult to grasp. Not just because a movie like Tron: Ares will play around the world, but also because it will be marketed with 100-plus-metre-tall movie posters on the sides of buildings.

“It’s impossible to process that,” Lee says. “Going to Korea and having my face, and name, and Tron, written in Korean ... it’s hard to compute, absolutely. That’s an ongoing process for me. I am awestruck by all of this, absolutely. It’s just a dream. It’s a total dream.”

Tron: Ares opens in cinemas on October 9.

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