The New Girl Actress Once Dreamed of Being the Asian Reese Witherspoon

Greta Lee in High Maintenance / Courtesy of Janky Clown Productions

Greta Lee hasn’t had a single breakout role. Instead, the 31-year-old has made an impression through several small, consistently memorable parts on the freshest shows on TV. She has a knack for oblivious, self-absorbed characters, like High Maintenance’s Homeless Heidi, a woman who instigates flings with guys so she can crash in their apartments. Or Soojin, the shrill, fast-talking art gallerist who hires Allison Williams’ Marnie on Girls. She’s also a regular on Inside Amy Schumer, where she helps round out the comedian’s gaggle of violently self-loathing women.

Lee, a Los Angeles native who now lives in Brooklyn, will continue her run with a recurring role in this season of “The New Girl” starting tonight, along with parts in a number of new projects — including Chris Rock’s Top Five and The Nest, a film starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. We chatted about her days on Broadway, her feelings about the lack of Asian-American actresses on screen, and why she loves playing detestable characters.

You appear on a lot of shows that are considered cool right now — buzzed-about, funny, culturally relevant. Was that something you planned?

I hear that a lot: “You’re on the coolest shows!” I’ll never get sick of hearing that, and it really makes me laugh. With High Maintenance, those guys are friends of mine. This was way before it turned into the success that it’s become. Lena Dunham saw me in a play called 4,000 Miles. She contacted me after, saying, “I just saw you in this play and thought you were amazing, and I wrote something for you. Would you want to come to our table read on Monday?” There was so much buzz around the show. They had written something for me playing Jeff Goldbum’s girlfriend, which ended up getting shifted around.

InsideAmy Schumer, Season 1 / Courtesy of Comedy Central

What about Amy Schumer?

Schumer and I technically met at the table read for Girls. We only exchanged a few words. And the next time we saw each other was at an audition for Frances Ha. We took the elevator together, and she was just starting to put her show together, and we recognized each other from the table read, and I said hello. And I ended up going to shoot the Compliments sketch for her show. At the time, I was just like, “I’m in Tompkins Square Park with a fake gun in my hand, doing this sketch, and I don’t know who’s going to see it.”

Greta Lee as Soojin in Girls / Courtesy of HBO

You often play characters who are ditzy and mean and uninterested in playing by the rules. Where does that come from?

In life, some of the most interesting people are the people lacking in self-awareness. It’s part admiration, part repulsion, part jealousy of people who can’t help being themselves, no matter how horrific or unlikeable they can come across.

What were your early acting days like?

I was a theater major at Northwestern, but it still felt like there were a lot of other things I could have ended up doing with my life. I would take anthropology classes and be like, “Oh yeah, this is where it’s at. I want to go out and do field work.” But I moved to New York to do theater; I was weirdly set on becoming some kind of old-timey musical theater star.

I did Spelling Bee, the musical, right out of college. It was a Broadway gig, so it paid great, as far as I was concerned. And that was a cruel trick. I was like, awesome, why is everyone talking about this acting thing being so hard? And I didn’t have the discipline to save money. I was making it rain a little bit, buying drinks for my investment banker friends. My naive expectation was: I did this one Broadway play, so obviously I’m going to become the next Natalie Portman. Here I come, the Asian Reese Witherspoon.

After that, I did all sorts of different jobs. I worked the restaurant circuit. I worked for Momofuku for many years. When I first moved to New York, I had this fantasy: Oh great, this is going to be just like Sex and the City now. I feel like that’s a shared thing among young women — my girlfriends and I look back on it a lot and think about how stupid we were.

There are very few Asian-American actresses on TV or in movies. Do you feel like you’ll be typecast, or like there are limited roles?

I have such mixed feelings about the whole thing. I am battling it internally. On the one hand, I do feel like it’s insane that we’re lacking these roles, and we need to see more diversity. On the other hand, I’m kind of like, ugh, I don’t know. I used to think: ‘Oh, shoot, I want that job on that TV show, but they already have an Asian girl.” That was more harmful than anything the industry was doing, because I was unnecessarily getting in my own way by overthinking the racial and gender politics of it. Once you go in, people are like, “Oh yeah, that girl’s really sarcastic and dry,” and Asian is sort of the last word that’s used to describe what I’m doing. It turns out people care a lot less. Not to say that it’s not an issue, because it definitely is.

Greta Lee in the upcoming episode of The New Girl / Liane Hentscher/FOX

Can you talk about your role on “The New Girl”?

I play a new love interest for Nick, Jake Johnson’s character. I am the granddaughter of Tran, the silent Asian man on the show. It will seem, at first, almost identical to other characters that I’ve played, until there’s a surprise. I think it will remind people of other things I’ve done, but at the end, it’ll be a new thing.