‘Past Lives’ Star Teo Yoo on How He Used His Own Experiences of Loneliness to Inform His Character in Celine Song’s Film

A24’s Past Lives, writer-director Celine Song’s feature film debut, is a bittersweet and tender drama incorporating big ideas of cultural identity and fate within an intimate and surprising story of an unexpected love triangle.

Centered on Greta Lee’s Nora, the film follows the young woman as she emigrates from South Korea to Canada with her parents as a child, and later moves to New York City, where she lives and studies as an aspiring playwright. But a blast from the past comes back to haunt her when she reconnects with a childhood crush from Seoul — Teo Yoo’s Hae Sung — with whom she develops an emotional online relationship via video calls despite their extreme distance and the lack of real intimacy. Years later, after Nora has married fellow writer Arthur (John Magaro), Hae Sung visits New York to see her. 

Reuniting in person for the first time in decades, the pair are forced to interrogate their feelings for each other, while Nora especially is pulled in two directions — not just between Hae Sung and Arthur, but also between her dueling cultural identities. 

The German-born, South Korea-based Yoo speaks to THR about his journey into acting and how he used the sense memories of melancholy and loneliness to connect with Hae Sung’s sense of being an outsider. 

I keep thinking of the scenes with Greta, John and you at the bar that bookend the film — especially the one in the beginning, when the audience sees the three of you from an outsider’s perspective.

I remember Greta struggling with that scene. John and I love that vulnerability; we’re at home in that space. But she’s been playing off-kilter characters [throughout her career], masking that vulnerability. Because this was the first time she was a lead in something really dramatic. John and I were like, “Isn’t this great, being so vulnerable?” And Greta was like, “No!”

You have a surprising background — you grew up in Germany, studied acting in New York, and now live and work in South Korea. How much of your own journey allowed you to connect with Hae Sung?

I grew up in a Korean community in Germany — we were there through a labor agreement between the countries, and our dads worked in the coal mines or [in construction] building up the postwar Germany in the ’70s. All our mothers were nurses. I saw Chungking Express on German television, and it was the first time I felt a kind of melancholy and feeling out of place. I had a vocabulary that was cinematic. When I was younger, I wanted to be the first Korean NBA player; there was no one to show me my way into the performing arts. [When I moved to New York], I took a class with Irma Sandrey at the Strasberg Theatre. As an athlete, you listen to your coach and do it without judgment, which is what I did in that acting class. She asked me if I had performed before, and I said no — I was just doing whatever she told me to that day. I thought I’d see what it was all about, and then go back to school to become a physical therapist. She invited me to a master class, and I soon realized that sports is just another platform, a playground to get that feeling of being applauded onstage. I became much more focused on what I wanted; I hadn’t known it yet because no one had shown it to me.

What really informed me for Hae Sung was also feeling like an outsider. I’m not in the statistics of someone who’s supposed to “make it,” even in Korea. Trying to go into the A-list group of Korean actors as a foreign-born Korean — I’m the first. The sadness, the loneliness, was something that was always bottled up. I was just waiting for a script in which I was comfortable to express that, and Past Lives did that.

I’m not a Korean speaker, so I probably notice the physicality of your performance more than most actors in a film like this. Did you coordinate with the actor who plays the young Hae Sung in the beginning of the film, Seung Min Yim, to find out how he would move in the world? 

Rather than asking the young actor to adapt toward a character, it’s better to let him do whatever he can do. I let myself be inspired by him. He was very shy; he always had his elbows glued to his body. I found that very interesting, so I used a type of sense memory — like I had a magic rope around my body.

You and Greta have similar backgrounds. You grew up in Germany, she grew up in the United States, both raised by Korean parents. What was it like to maneuver through the Korean language together?

I don’t know how it was for Greta — I’m sure she felt vulnerable, and probably wanted to be better with the language, but Celine asked her not to. I have always worked with a language coach, no matter where I work. I have adapted to being the most Korean version of myself, having lived there for 15 years. I always want to steer away from Asian tropes [seen in Western films] and lean upon what I can do [with] the power of drama, the onscreen stoicism and charisma. I know how a leading man is deemed attractive in an Asian context, how Westerners think about Asian Americans — what features makes someone a leading man type. I am always looking for a way to marry the two, to take the language and make it accessible and authentic. I know the Western audience doesn’t know what I’m saying. (Laughs.) There’s only so much I can do with the body language and the way I act; to speak in English with a Korean accent can sound really comedic, so I tried to find the right level with Celine so that it sounded natural without sounding funny. 

In the beginning of the film, Hae Sung and Nora communicate through their computer screens over Skype. Did you rehearse those scenes in person?

We didn’t rehearse that much. It may be Celine’s [process], to have her actors memorize their lines and then be very natural in the moment. The scene where we break up [over Skype], we did it in real time — on the Korean side, the sun was going down; on the New York side, the sun was coming up. A lot of it was just being truthful in the moment and reacting to each other.

Celine comes from a theatrical background, where dialogue might be more important than action in terms of advancing the story. What about her directing style enabled you to bring Hae Sung’s interiority out in the open?

There’s so much you have in a stage environment that you don’t have in a film environment, and vice versa. I think the number one thing was trust — making sure I trust her and that she can trust me. But we also felt like an ensemble on set, and not just the actors, but people like our DP, Shabier Kirchner, or Ben Kahn, the assistant director. The trust functioned as a safety net in that environment because it’s a very vulnerable performance for all of us. Not feeling judged was a big thing.

The film is about a love triangle, but it doesn’t have a melodramatic ending in which Nora is forced to choose between two men. The men on either side of her are not exactly pushing her to make a choice between them, either. 

We talked a lot about that. I think there’s something about Celine’s experience with her husband [writer Justin Kuritzkes], and also John’s relationship with his wife [who is Korean]. I’m married to a Korean woman who is 11 years older than me, which is very against the norm. There was a mutual understanding about the maturity of how we can portray what sensitive masculinity is. Growing up with a certain way of how men are supposed to be, I was sometimes uncomfortable in my peer group. [We had little idea of] how two men can be vulnerable and intimate with each other without having any fear or stigma. I aspire to be respectful to everyone, no matter what gender you are, what age you are, what ethnicity you are — we’re all human beings trying to understand each other.

Which goes right back to the scene at the bar, in which we see a communication barrier between these two men who don’t share a language, much less a framework to process their feelings in this strange emotional situation.

Celine described it to me as a duel: We both have our swords drawn, and there’s a level of respect. And Hae Sung is going to lose the fight, so I went in with that emotionally and giving that space to John — that was very important to me.

The moment after Hae Sung and Nora reunite, she comes home and tells Arthur, “He’s so Korean.” As someone who grew up outside Korea, did that feel like part of the character you had to put on? 

It came natural to me, not because I am like that but because of the preparation given to me by the script — what he went through in his life, what his expectations are, his environment, his culture, his parents. In that sense, he’s very Korean. I became an actor late in life, at 22. I had to battle with those same demons, so I understood them. 

This story first appeared in a November standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.