“I’m such a huge fan”: the “dark, esoteric” British comedy Greta Lee adores
If you’ve seen Past Lives, the sprawling, tear-inducing, multi-award-winning 2023 movie starring Greta Lee, then I can almost guarantee one thought you didn’t have while watching it was, ‘Hmm, I bet the star of this absolutely loves the work of the bloke who wrote Alan Partridge’.
But then that just goes to show that we should never judge a book by its cover, and by book, of course, I mean a very talented American actor who somehow even managed to make that Tron film with Jared Leto look half-decent.
Now, if you haven’t seen Past Lives then probably you’re most likely to know Lee either from her work on the acclaimed Netflix time-loop comedy-drama Russian Doll, or from Apple TV’s The Morning Show, the second of which brought her an Emmy nomination but that she had to leave simply because she had too many different offers of work coming in at the same time.
Since then she has found time to make last year’s excellently tense nuclear war drama A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, which is well worth two hours of your time if you want to be even more panicked by the prospect of an impending World War III than you already are simply by looking at your phone at any hour of any given day at the moment.
Even amidst a cast of heavy-hitters including Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba and Jared Harris, she still manages to steal that film as a mum trying to have a day off with her kid while fending off phone calls from the President asking her whether or not America might be getting attacked by North Korea.
And perhaps Lee was inspired by the conflict at the heart of one of her favourite films, which turns out to be 2017’s The Death of Stalin, written and directed by that aforementioned Partridge scribe Armando Iannucci, the black comedy set in 1950s Soviet Union which critics absolutely loved but unfortunately Russians didn’t, banning the film immediately for mocking the country’s past.
Lee is a big admirer, however, telling The Oscars website, “I’m such a huge fan of Armando’s work. I love an ensemble. I love that kind of physical comedy and satire. I love British comedy, that kind of dark, esoteric comedy, and I like his historically based characters. I love scenarios where you are able to see yourself in horrible people, like historically known to be horrible people. If you can pull that off, I just find that very gratifying as a viewer.”
Starring a fearsomely talented array of actors, including Steve Buscemi, Paddy Considine, Michael Palin, and Andrea Riseborough, The Death of Stalin was a moderate hit at the box office on release, doing well at cinemas despite the source material being fairly dark and dense. The Communist Party of Russia didn’t agree with the critics, though, calling it “revolting”.
Lee, meanwhile, has two very tonally different projects in the works for this year, firstly Toy Story 5, which many people feel is an unnecessary sequel, but then so was the fourth one with that ventriloquist doll who looked like Jimmy Carr. In it, she will voice the character of ‘Lilypad’, which is, reasonably cleverly, an iPad shaped like a frog. Then there’s 11817, a Netflix-produced sci-fi horror starring Lee and The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura about a family trapped in their house with no way out.
