Lana Condor Invites Us Home

“Seattle is really known for its seafood.”

Lana Condor says, standing over a drawer jam-packed with every spice imaginable, digging around for the perfect seasoning. The actor’s new house in Seattle is still a work in progress, but her kitchen teems with love. In one corner there’s a portrait of her precious dog, Emmy, a gift from her parents for her birthday. Across the counter sits a photo of Lana and boyfriend, Anthony De La Torre, from 2015, when he still had long hair and the couple were sharing a tiny studio with a mini-fridge, before To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before catapulted Lana into the spotlight.

“I figured I would cook for you, which is my all-time love, all-time pleasure,” Lana says when I step into her home and slip off my shoes. “All I ever want to do is watch Bobby Flay and do all the cooking shows. I'm obsessed with Tasty.”

If you follow Lana on Instagram, you know just how much of a foodie she is. I offer my service as her sous chef for the afternoon, but she doesn’t let me lift a finger. Lana has planned a dinner of Frutti di Mare, using bucatini with fresh, homemade tomato sauce, mussels, shrimp, and clams perfectly seasoned and tossed in. She tops it all off with parmesan cheese.

It’s a couple of days before Christmas, and the 22-year-old actor finally has her first real break in nearly two years. In August 2018, To All the Boys premiered on Netflix and almost instantly became a teen rom-com classic. Right after that, Lana jumped into her next project, the boarding-school-for-budding-assassins series, Deadly Class. Once that wrapped, she began filming the second and third installments of the To All the Boys films. It’s been a long sprint, so while working on the sequels, she took stock of the most important parts of her life, and decided to move to Seattle to be closer to her parents.

“My family's everything. And this past year and a half, I barely saw them,” Lana tells me as she washes mussels at the sink and Anthony is perched on a seat at the counter. “In L.A., everything is the industry, so you can't really get away from it at all if you live there, you know? Then, all of a sudden, you realize in a still moment that there's really nothing left inside.”

When Lana was a baby, she and her brother were adopted from Vietnam by their parents and brought to Chicago, where they lived for six years. Her dad, a journalist, had an opportunity out west in Washington, so the family relocated to Whidbey Island, which she calls “hippie farmland,” where she milked goats, took lunch to school in a basket, and learned multiplication from “the multiplication fairy.” A few years later the Condors moved to the Upper East Side in New York City, trading in goats for Gossip Girl-fanatic classmates at a private Catholic school.

Throughout Lana’s childhood she studied ballet at storied institutions, including Joffrey Ballet and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. When her father got a job in Los Angeles, he gave the family a choice of staying in New York or heading back to the west coast. They chose California, where she graduated early from high school and booked a role as the firework-slinging Jubilee in the 2016 film X-Men: Apocalypse. Having caught the acting bug, she deferred from college to try acting for a year. It took her nine months to nab another job, Patriots Day. That’s when she started to work pretty consistently, full-on committed to performing.

When they shot the first To All the Boys movie, it was on a shoestring budget, with no concrete plans for whether it would be released in theaters or on a streaming service, much less become one of Netflix’s most rewatched movies of the year. On February 12, fans will see Lana reprise her role as Lara Jean Song-Covey in one of the most eagerly anticipated movies of 2020. Given the additional resources this time around, Lana teases, “your wardrobe is heightened, your beauty is heightened, everything.”

To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You picks up soon after the events of the first movie, with Lana’s Lara Jean and Noah Centineo’s Peter Kavinsky finally actually dating following their sham relationship. They’re going on fancy dates, sending paper lanterns emblazoned with their initials into the night sky, and promising to not break each other’s heart. Lara Jean finally has what the characters in her beloved romance novels have, until childhood crush and recipient of one of her original love letters, John Ambrose McClaren, shows up and knocks her right off her feet. If you fell for Peter Kavinsky, just wait until you meet the quietly charming John Ambrose, played by Jordan Fisher. The movie’s director, Michael Fimognari, has already fanned the flames of what is sure to be a love triangle for the ages.

When Lana was reading the original books by Jenny Han, who also serves as an executive producer, she texted the author something along the lines of, “Why would you do this to me? John Ambrose is perfect — why would you ever put me in this situation?” But Lana is quick to point out that To All the Boys is much more than a love story about a girl and a boy, and that P.S. I Still Love You is the middle of Lara Jean’s full story.

Although John Ambrose was featured in an extremely short post-credits scene in the first movie and implied to be white in the books, the production team searched for a new actor and made the casting call color-blind, ultimately choosing Jordan. Lana says that many of the actors that came in for chemistry reads for John Ambrose were trying to re-create the same macho suaveness that Noah brings to Peter. But when Jordan arrived, and nailed the sensitivity and intelligence that makes John Ambrose the enamoring young man he is, Lana knew he was the right one for the role.

“Would I prefer it to be someone that's a person of color? Yes, for my own... call it selfish reasons that I would like our diverse film to be even more diverse. I actually don't think that's selfish; I just think that's right,” Lana says about the recasting. “But I also wasn't, ‘I'm only going to read with people of color or no one at all.’ I just really wanted the world to see a world of To All the Boys that looks like the one that you see every day.”

Part of the magic stems from how To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before tugs the heartstrings in all the right places. It follows the recipe for the quintessential teen romantic comedy: good-natured protagonist on a journey of self-discovery, a romance you can’t help but become smitten with, heartwarming family dynamics. The movie, and how Lana plays Lara Jean especially, make you feel at home.

“I had my eye on her for a while before we met because there’s so few young, Asian-American actresses working,” Jenny tells Teen Vogue of Lana. “When we met, she was just the sparkliest, most energetic ray of light. She was really self-possessed for someone so young. The character is a less confident person and it’s just a testament to how good of an actress she is — she really made you believe her in the part and embodied it so beautifully.”

For Asian Americans, To All the Boys also provided another layer of comfort: finally seeing a teen rom-com protagonist who looks like them. The movie’s success was in part due to the choice to keep the character Asian, despite producers from other production companies who initially wanted to whitewash Lara Jean. To All the Boys deftly portrays Lara Jean’s half-Korean identity without tokenization. She’s a teenage girl who just so happens to enjoy Yakults and occasionally wears a hanbok for family gatherings.

“I've never had a Cinderella moment nor have I seen, besides I think Crazy Rich Asians, an Asian Cinderella moment, where she's walking down the stairs, and it's beautiful, and you're like, ‘Holy crap,’” Lana says about one of the scenes in the upcoming sequel, of which you can get a peek from the trailer. “I was standing on top of the stairs, and I was so emotional.”

“I feel proud to use my voice and continue to tell people that the Asian-American experience is not one experience alone,” Lana says. “It's something that I don't plan on ever stopping. Making TV and movies is awesome, but if you have a purpose behind it, it's even better.”

She points out how incredible it’s been to see a movie like Lulu Wang’s The Farewell get the attention it deserves. But she wants to see Asian actors play a variety of roles not predicated on race. “The new Gossip Girl reboot: How amazing would it be if the lead just happened to be Asian?!”

Lana is thankful to be bolstered by peers who are also pushing for better representation in front of and behind the camera. Along with Jenny, she says it was helpful having Netflix’s Sheroum Kim on the production team, another Asian American woman. Lana has witnessed a genuine shift in how women of color are treated in the industry, such as being taken more seriously in meetings and auditions. In the past, there were times when Lana felt like casting people saw her just to check off the box of auditioning someone of color. As demeaning as it felt, she would tell herself that she’d “change their minds.” At one point, a casting person even told her to “be more like Hello Kitty,” Lana recalls, clearly incensed by the memory (“What the f*ck does that mean? That's so insanely ignorant and racist”). She’s more conscious than ever, and like many other people, didn’t fully realize during her younger years the hurdles faced when you don’t fit what has been the mold historically.

“It didn't even occur to me that I might have a disadvantage towards the other girls at the Joffrey Ballet because I looked different. I thought everyone loves everyone and we all got ample and equal opportunity,” Lana says. “But then I would continue to see Clara [The Nutcracker lead] look the same every year. She was white every year. And then I [thought], But I'm just as good as that girl who plays Clara. That's weird. Why aren't I Clara?”

Before we formally sit down for dinner, Lana and Anthony take me on a tour of the rest of the house, with Emmy trailing us. In the living room there’s a framed picture from their trip to Kenya, and in an upstairs hallway there’s a family portrait from The Chicago Tribune, which was used in a story written by her father about Lana and her brother’s adoption. In the master bedroom Anthony’s Spongebob Squarepants alarm clock, which he’s had since seventh grade, rests on the nightstand next to the bed where Lana is often curled up with a thriller novel in her downtime. Across from the master bedroom is a powder room that houses all of Lana’s beauty products. She sends me home with two sheet masks that she swears by (“I have hundreds — take these”). They’re turning the spare bedroom into a workspace, including a vocal booth for Anthony to work on his music and a setup for Lana’s self-tapes.

The pair have made a song for Anthony’s upcoming EP, marking the first time they’ll be releasing art together for public consumption. Titled “Raining in London,” it’s a somber track upticked with a synthy-pop sound that has taken “blood, sweat, and tears.” They teased it as a "very special project" earlier this year and soon enough, fans will hear them singing together in the dreamy duet.

Lana wasn't always so forthcoming about her personal love life. In past interviews, she admitted that she and Noah “encouraged the speculation” about the chemistry between them as a way to drum up the movie’s already viral buzz, because they “believe in the story.” But fans started to blur the line between Lana the actor and Lara Jean the character, and they flooded social media with negative comments after they uncovered Anthony as Lana’s IRL boyfriend.

“I love Noah with all my heart, but the switch was when people started attacking Anthony online,” she says. “That was when I realized as much as I can show my love and my friendship to Noah… I can't be that private with Anthony, because people are starting to be really hurtful to him. He's been by my side through everything. He's such an amazing person and has been an integral part of me staying literally sane.”

The two joke about how Anthony’s Instagram explore page filled with photos of Lana and Noah, specifically the jacuzzi scene from the first TATB movie (Anthony quips, “I'm just like, ‘All right. This is my life now. It's all good’”). There’s no bad blood between the guys, though, and Lana says they get along splendidly.

“It was so funny because Noah and Jordan met Anthony both at the same time,” she says. “They came over to my house. It was so cute, because it almost felt like —”

Anthony jumps in, “Your three boyfriends meeting each other?”

“Like my three boyfriends all meeting each other,” she affirms.

When we get to the roof deck, it’s a minefield of puddles, thanks to the signature Seattle rain, and my shoes are unfortunately downstairs at the front door. Anthony insists that I put on a pair of his Nike trainers, and I step out into the chilly air with Lana.

“And this is our view,” Lana says, gesturing at the dazzling Seattle skyline, complete with the Space Needle, Pike Place Market neon sign, and Elliott Bay. “You can see ferries going in and out. At night it’s so pretty, especially because everyone has their lights up for Christmas.”

(Dinner is delicious — so good that I want seconds, but don’t want to impose.)

Seeing the life that Lana and Anthony are building together resonates with everything Lana tells me about her need to recharge and center herself after such a fast-paced couple of years. The exposure from To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before made her an overnight sensation, which included an avalanche of opportunities she felt obligated to say yes to, and squeezing in commitments to every inch of her schedule.

“There was a real moment where I couldn't get off the couch. I couldn't eat. I couldn't speak,” she says. “I was having so much anxiety, and I was so empty because of how much I had given to others and not taking any time for myself.”

To survive, Lana had to accept that she couldn’t do everything and learn how to say no. Once she internalized that, she started to feel like herself again. There’s been transitional pain, some instances more frightening than others, like fans trying to get into her hotel room or being followed through the grocery store. But for the most part, To All the Boys fans are a loving, kind group that wants to give Lana a tight embrace when they spot her. She posits that it's because they want Lara Jean to be their best friend.

The second TATB flick is only going to strengthen that bond. P.S. I Still Love You follows Lara Jean as she becomes more aware of the world around her, from repairing old friendships to becoming a “blossoming feminist.” There’s even a scene where Peter and Lara Jean have the sex talk.

“I hope that young people feel less alone in having conversations about safe sex. It's totally fine to wait or don't wait, but at least know that it's your choice and your decision to do that,” she says. “I think what I'm most proud of in the sequel is that Lara Jean is having a conversation with Peter.”

Lana’s passion for empowering education for young people has led her to organize a scholarship through the Asia Foundation, where girls from Cần Thơ, Vietnam, are sponsored for necessities such as books, uniforms, and transportation. She cites accessibility as a major issue for girls getting to school, and the scholarship provides bikes, which cut the travel time in half. Lana recently worked with Michelle Obama for her Girls Opportunity Alliance and visited the grassroot leaders in Vietnam and Malaysia to break down the barriers that prevent girls from pursuing their educational aspirations along with meeting the students themselves.

All of a sudden, when we got to Vietnam, for the first time in my life I felt really still and then grounded, rooted.”

Before her philanthropy work, Lana had a major life moment: For the first time, she returned to the orphanage in Vietnam where she was adopted. Leading up to that landmark occasion, Lana was consumed by a cacophony of fears: that she wasn’t ready, that it would be anticlimactic, that people would think she was an outsider.

“I was terrified people would look at me and be like, ‘Why were you given a chance?’ I was afraid people were going to think that my parents weren't my parents,” she shares. “But I was received with an abundance of love. All of a sudden, when we got to Vietnam, for the first time in my life I felt really still and then grounded, rooted.”

The orphanage is now a nursing home, but Lana and her family were able to walk around the building and see the exact place where her father found her. The paint on the walls and the curtains hadn’t changed.

“I cried all the time,” she says. “I cried in the morning when I woke up. I cried in the car looking at the scenery. I cried while talking to the locals. I cried on the plane going back because I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I want to go back right now.’”

Tears are understandable during a return with this level of emotional gravity. As Lana puts it, “being adopted is the greatest thing in this world,” and it saved her life. Reckoning with that is bound to be a life-altering experience.

There are a lot of exciting prospects between P.S. I Still Love You and her duet with Anthony, but Lana has a number of projects in the works and dreams she’d still like to achieve. She’d love to do something a bit more unexpected for her, darker stuff, and get back into some of the action she was doing for Deadly Class. Of course, along with the TATB sequel also comes the final chapter, Always and Forever, Lara Jean.

“From the very beginning, when we first met, what I said to Lana was I just wanted her to be able to have a long career,” Jenny says. “As somebody who comes from the book world, I've seen a lot of young actresses propel off of young adult book properties. We really haven't had the opportunity to see that with young women of color. I just wanted to see her be able to get those same kinds of opportunities that we've seen other young women get.”

Whatever Lana cooks up next, it’s bound to be good.

Credits:

Stylist: Michelle Li

Hair: Amber Duarte

Makeup: Tsipporah Liebman

Manicurist: Thuy Nguyen

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue