Netflix’s “The Half of It” Star Leah Lewis Explains Why Ellie Chu’s Story Is Vital to the Coming-of-Age Canon

Netflix’s new coming of age film The Half of It is not a traditional love story, even if it seems like one on the surface.

Written and directed by Alice Wu, the film takes place in the remote town of Squahamish, where high schooler Ellie Chu (played by Leah Lewis) finds herself on the outskirts of her community as a queer first-generation Chinese immigrant. She is quickly roped into a classic “get the girl” scheme by classmate Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer), thanks to her entrepreneurial streak (read: she writes school essays for hire). But from there, The Half of It diverges from other teen dramedies; for starters, Ellie is also in love with the dreamy Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire).

The story isn’t all about who wins the girl. It’s about something much more elusive: finding a sense of belonging, and building the bravery required to own your identity in a world that’s decidedly chosen one for you.

“Most people think a love story has an equation, and that’s usually boy meets girl, girl meets boy, or girl meets girl,” Leah Lewis tells Teen Vogue. “It’s a self-love story because these characters don’t really end up with each other, but at the very end, they end up with something. For me, that’s even more valuable than just finding your other half; it’s finding a part of yourself along the way. It is a love story, it’s just not a ‘romance’ story.”

Leah, a 23-year-old performer from Florida, started acting in 2006 before landing a main role in The CW series Nancy Drew as George Fan. When she auditioned for The Half Of It, she had originally imagined Ellie to be more upbeat. But she describes the character now as a 50-year-old who grew up in a teenager’s body.

Even though Ellie is only a high school senior, her responsibilities include taking care of herself and her father, who the people of Squahamish largely reject on account of his heavily-accented English — his PhD in engineering means nothing to the American job market, and he’s shunted into manning the small local train stop. It’s a subtle, but poignant nod to the unique hardships that immigrants often face in a society that doesn’t always see them as equal. It’s out of imminent financial stress that Ellie agrees to help Paul ghost-write love letters to Aster, a far cry from why teenagers usually involve themselves in hare-brained proposals for crushes.

When Ellie starts catfishing Aster as Paul, what she unlocks is something more profound than a relationship with the girl of her dreams. It unveils to Ellie her own desires, a luxury of being able to want that she hadn’t been able to afford before.

“She knows so much about so many things, but knows so little about the things that she never really got to experience or learn from,” Leah says. “That is a really important part of the immigrant family’s experience, just thinking that this is how it has to be, and not being able to break out of that mold.”

Compared to the campier, more classic rom-com vibes in Netflix hits such as To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before or The Kissing Booth, The Half of It is a different kind of movie: quieter, but more explicitly unpacking complicated issues like race and sexuality.

With stories that focus on marginalized identities, representation is a hard line to walk. On one hand, there is the need to acknowledge the struggles that come with being different. But on the other hand, one person’s story is not indicative of the universal experience of being Asian or queer (or both) in America. What is so beautiful about The Half of It is that it knows the latter; Leah acknowledges how “awesome it is to have stories starring Asian female leads,” but also how unique each portrayal is.

In the film, Ellie’s classmates toss out casual, generalized jokes about her Chinese heritage — she’s called “Chugga Chugga Chu Chu” more often than her actual name, and she’s referred to as “the Chinese girl” as a way of other-izing her. When Leah was reading the script, she kept having moments where she would re-contextualize her own experiences, noticing subtle microaggressions from her past. “As someone who is still trying to get in touch with the Asian community and that side of myself, I was [feeling like] like, ‘Oh my god, I didn't even realize that was even happening to me in high school,’” she says. “There have been times when people were like, how do you like rice? And I never even thought that comment might have been inappropriate.”

Meanwhile, watching Ellie Chu yearn, both for the girl and her future, is achingly familiar to anyone who’s ever felt like an outcast. Like the audience, Leah just wants Ellie to find love. But where she finds it is not where she had expected, elevating the film’s — and Ellie’s — definition of relationships and how they shape us. It’s a beautiful nod to the idea that in order to be loved, you have to be seen. And Ellie is seen by Paul, a warmhearted, endearingly confused jock who is the catalyst of Ellie’s road to self-acceptance.

“In books and in movies, we think that love is supposed to be a certain way and so many [stories about] teenagers depict it in a certain way,” Leah says. “But what these characters come to find is — even me as Leah in my relationships — we experience it completely different. We have no clue what love is going to look like on us.” She believes Ellie and Paul are soulmates, even though they aren’t romantically involved: “A soulmate is literally someone with a soul you connect on such a deep level; you see each other for who you truly are.”

Ellie opens several doors throughout The Half of It: some lead to friendship, some lead to love, and all lead to a future outside of Squahamish. And even as undeniably important as Ellie’s friendship with Paul is, her own relationship with herself is what ultimately shapes the film. In highlighting that, it opens up the idea that we can have multiple tales about coming-of-age and have them all be valid.

“I’m really excited to surprise people with that aspect, to show people another side of the Asian American experience, which I think is really important,” she says. The Half of It is one story among many of what it means to grow up and grow into yourself, and it’s an important one. “These are real experiences that people go through, this is what Alice went through, and what I went through as well. All of us have our own different way of telling Ellie’s story as an Asian-American in this town.”

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue