Episode details
Podcast: Good Hang with Amy Poehler
Episode: “Greta Lee Lives in L.A. and Grows Vegetables Now” / “Greta Lee”
Host: Amy Poehler
Main guest: Greta Lee
Opening guest: Alison Roman
YouTube channel: Good Hang with Amy Poehler
Publication date: June 23, 2026
Runtime: about 1 hour 12 minutes
Main topics: Greta Lee’s career, Toy Story 5, Past Lives, Russian Doll, restaurant work, Momofuku, Sisters, Korean language, acting, fashion, motherhood, gardening, and the physical absurdity of pretending to drown or run for a living.
Quick verdict
This is one of those Good Hang episodes where the title undersells the episode. Yes, Greta Lee lives in L.A. and grows vegetables now. Yes, she brings Amy Poehler produce. Yes, they talk about kale, avocados, Diet Coke, stain-removal videos, and whether lettuce is too dramatic to grow in warm weather.
But underneath the extremely casual hangout energy is a smart, funny, unexpectedly layered conversation about what it means to be watched, misread, typecast, praised, exhausted, and still somehow willing to show up with flowers from your garden.
The episode works because Poehler and Lee have history. They are not strangers doing a press tour transaction. They have worked together on Broad City, Old Soul, Sisters, and Russian Doll, and the conversation carries the relaxed rhythm of two performers who know each other’s timing. Poehler is openly admiring without turning the interview into flattery mush, and Lee is loose, self-deprecating, and specific in a way that makes the episode feel more revealing than a standard “actor talks about latest project” appearance.
The headline hook is Toy Story 5, where Lee plays Lilypad, the iPad-like villain at the center of Pixar’s toys-versus-tech story. The film opened in theaters on June 19, 2026, and Lee voices the smart tablet that challenges Bonnie’s attention away from the traditional toys. Reuters describes the new movie as a tech-tension story in which Bonnie feels social pressure to swap toys for a high-tech tablet, while Jessie goes through an emotional journey about relevance in a screen-driven world.
But the real episode is not only about Pixar. It is about Greta Lee’s entire range: the Broadway-trained, Korean American, former Momofuku hostess who became a scene-stealer in comedy, then delivered one of the most quietly devastating film performances of the decade in Past Lives, and now somehow makes an animated tablet sound like a psychologically rich comic villain.
Why people are searching for this episode
The search intent around this Good Hang episode is unusually broad. Fans may arrive through “Greta Lee Good Hang,” “Amy Poehler Greta Lee interview,” “Greta Lee Toy Story 5 villain,” “Greta Lee Lilypad,” “Greta Lee Past Lives interview,” or “Greta Lee Sisters nail salon scene.” Others will be looking for the Momofuku story, the Russian Doll reunion, or the viral discussion of whether Lee’s Sisters nail salon scene “holds up.”
That last topic has already generated entertainment coverage. TheWrap highlighted Lee and Poehler’s discussion of the Sisters scene, especially Lee’s point that the scene works for her because the status is inverted and her character is in control. People covered Lee’s memories of working at Momofuku, noting that she worked there on and off for about five years beginning in 2007 and joked about the power she felt as a hostess at one of New York’s hottest restaurants.
That is the SEO value of the episode: it is not a single-topic interview. It is a cluster of highly searchable Greta Lee moments, all tied together by Poehler’s format and their shared comedy-world history.
The Alison Roman opening: restaurants, hospitality, and the question that unlocks the episode
Before Greta Lee enters, Poehler speaks with Alison Roman, the cookbook author, food personality, podcaster, and founder of First Bloom. Roman’s role is not random celebrity drop-in. Good Hang often starts by bringing in someone who knows the main guest and can “speak well behind their back.” Here, Roman is perfect because she connects Lee to a pre-fame New York restaurant world that becomes one of the episode’s strongest themes.
Roman and Poehler begin with groceries, co-ops, artichokes, hosting anxiety, and the fantasy of standing in a store aisle telling people what to do with red lentils. It sounds like a tangent, but it sets up one of the episode’s central ideas: some people carry hospitality as a personality trait. Roman describes Lee as hard-working, kind, hilarious, stylish, and genuinely hospitable — someone who hosts, includes, and creates a “more the merrier” atmosphere.
Her question for Lee is also the right one: what did restaurant work teach her, and what has she carried from that world into acting?
That question gives the episode its spine. Restaurant work becomes a metaphor for performance. Hosting becomes a metaphor for control. Being “in the weeds” becomes a metaphor for the crush of multitasking, exhaustion, timing, emotional labor, and the ability to keep moving while ten things are on fire.
It is one of the reasons this episode is better than a thin recap. On paper, “Greta Lee talks to Amy Poehler” sounds like another celebrity interview. In practice, it becomes a conversation about labor: restaurant labor, acting labor, emotional labor, maternal labor, and the weird labor of being a public person expected to look effortless.
Greta Lee arrives with produce, and the episode becomes instantly more alive
When Lee finally enters the studio, she does not arrive empty-handed. She brings flowers, kale, eggplant, avocados, citrus, lemon verbena, Mexican lime, and the general aura of a person who has become both a movie star and the neighbor who might leave vegetables on your porch.
This is the kind of detail that makes Good Hang feel different from a standard press interview. The produce is funny, but it is also character work. Lee’s entrance tells you something before she does: she is generous, slightly chaotic, deeply L.A. in the most garden-coded way, and aware of the absurdity of all of it. Poehler immediately frames this as success — having a garden and bringing people your fruit.
The eggplant exchange is one of the episode’s funniest early beats. Lee brings eggplant; Poehler confesses she does not like eggplant because it is too slimy. Lee immediately accepts the comic defeat. It is exactly the kind of low-stakes personal moment Poehler’s show is built to create. The joke matters because it lowers the temperature of the interview. From there, they can talk about real things without the episode feeling heavy.
The produce also foreshadows the end of the episode, where they return to gardening. Lee, who has played emotionally complicated characters, fashion muse, comedy oddball, mother, immigrant daughter, and now Pixar villain, is also a person who has strong opinions about lettuce. That range is the episode’s whole point.
Amy Poehler’s central read on Greta Lee: serious about work, not about herself
Early in the main conversation, Poehler offers a crisp description of Lee: she takes the work seriously but does not take herself seriously. Lee agrees.
That line could almost be the thesis of the episode. Lee’s career has required serious discipline: theater training, Broadway and West End work, recurring comedy roles, prestige television, Past Lives, voice acting, press, fashion, and physically demanding film work. But her way of talking about all of it is allergic to self-mythologizing. She refuses to make herself sound grand, even when the facts of her career are impressive.
Poehler keeps trying to pull Lee back to the accomplishments: Northwestern, classical singing, opera competitions, Law & Order: SVU, Broadway, Mark Rylance, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the West End. Lee keeps swerving into jokes, embarrassment, or “no one cares.” That tension is charming because Poehler is right: people do care. Lee’s route to this moment is not the overnight-success narrative that entertainment coverage often likes to sell. It is years of stage work, television parts, restaurant shifts, comedy scenes, supporting roles, and gradual expansion.
Lee talks about being a child of Korean immigrants, growing up with Korean as her first language, going through ESL and speech therapy, and having what she describes as a Korean Brooklyn accent after living in Canarsie. It is a small but revealing detail, especially because language later becomes central to the discussion of Past Lives. Lee’s relationship to Korean is not abstract. It is embodied, personal, and historically tied to family, childhood, assimilation, embarrassment, memory, and work.
The first acting job: Law & Order: SVU and the immigrant-family TV nightmare
Lee’s first major screen job was Law & Order: SVU, which delights Poehler because Good Hang loves procedural television. The exchange quickly becomes funny and dark because Poehler admits she sometimes avoids SVU because the subject matter is too intense. Lee then reveals she was in “the incest” episode — or, more precisely, the roommate of the victim in an episode involving incest.
The comedy here is not about the subject. It is about the absurdity of an actor’s first break being the kind of role you excitedly tell your immigrant parents to watch without fully explaining what they are about to see. Lee remembers calling her parents and saying, essentially, “I did it.” Then comes the reality: network crime drama, giant studio bells, crying on cue, and the terrifying machinery of a professional set.
This anecdote captures a recurring theme: acting is glamorous from the outside and deeply strange from the inside. It asks performers to do emotionally or physically extreme things in artificial conditions, while everyone around them behaves like this is normal. Poehler and Lee return to that idea repeatedly, especially when they discuss drowning, running, and ice skating.
Restaurant work and the power of the hostess
The Momofuku section is one of the most widely covered parts of the episode for a reason. Lee tells Poehler she worked for David Chang at Momofuku around 2007 and 2008, on and off for about five years. People’s coverage of the interview notes that Lee described that era as exciting because chefs were treated like rock stars and Momofuku was one of the most difficult reservations in New York.
Lee’s best line is that she felt powerful as a hostess. She was “basically encouraged to be mean,” and the restaurant culture at the time allowed a hostess to tell people the wait would be four hours. Poehler, who worked at Aqua Grill in SoHo, immediately understands the type of power being discussed. This is not corporate power. It is doorway power. It is the power to say yes, no, wait, leave, or maybe if you behave.
The restaurant stories are funny, but they also explain something about Lee’s acting. A hostess at a hot restaurant is always performing. She reads status, absorbs pressure, manages disappointment, sees through fake charm, and controls the room without appearing to sweat. That is acting-adjacent work. It is also class-adjacent work. The restaurant becomes a theater where money, scarcity, ego, and desire meet at the door.
When Roman asks what restaurant work gave Lee, Lee talks about being “in the weeds” — that overwhelmed restaurant state where everything is happening at once. She connects that feeling to acting, where multitasking can become extreme and invisible. You are remembering lines, hitting marks, managing emotion, listening, reacting, staying open, and often doing something physically uncomfortable while pretending it is all natural.
That is a sharp observation. A lot of celebrity interviews treat early service jobs as cute origin stories. Here, the restaurant years are not decorative. They are training.
Drowning on camera: when fake acting becomes real danger
One of the episode’s funniest and most revealing sections is Lee’s rant about acting like she is drowning. Her point is brutally simple: acting like you are drowning is, in practice, a lot like drowning.
Poehler immediately understands the horror. The conversation becomes a dark comic analysis of what performers are asked to do for realism. Lee explains that when the drowning looks convincing, the crew cannot easily tell whether the actor is acting well or actually in trouble. The supposed solution is a hand signal, but as Poehler and Lee point out, a person who is actually drowning may not be able to signal without breaking the scene — or surviving.
The comedy comes from professional absurdity. Actors are expected to be good at things that no one should want to be good at. Poehler delivers one of the episode’s wisest jokes: do not be good at things you do not want to do. If you are good at drowning, you may be asked to drown again.
The section broadens when Lee talks about running for Tron. She describes having to sprint for her life across repeated takes, measuring the total distance as roughly half-marathon territory, and then being unable to walk the next day. Poehler relates it to her own experience on Blades of Glory, where she tried to distract an ice-dancing coach with coffee and personal questions to avoid getting on the ice.
Again, the theme is labor disguised as glamour. Viewers see a dramatic scene. The actor remembers swallowed water, torn muscles, exhaustion, and the surreal request to do it again for coverage.
Motherhood, boy energy, and being outside whether you like it or not
Poehler and Lee also bond over being mothers of boys. Lee’s sons are younger; Poehler’s are teenagers. Their conversation is funny because it avoids sentimental motherhood cliché and goes straight to the physical reality: boys often need to be run around like dogs.
Lee talks about wanting her sons to be outside and in their bodies, which means she has to be outside too. If she wants them to play soccer, she is playing soccer. If she wants them moving, she is moving. Poehler, with older sons, recognizes the stage Lee is in and gently previews the future: teenage boys, driving, voting, and the almost unimaginable fact that the small kids become people out in the world.
The “boy mom” section is light, but it matters because it echoes the episode’s broader concern with bodies. Lee’s body is asked to run in movies, look powerful in Calvin Klein, pose on red carpets, raise children, travel for press, survive jet lag, and still produce vegetables. The show never turns this into a manifesto, but the accumulation is there. A career like Lee’s is not only emotional and artistic. It is physical.
Old Soul, Sisters, and the comedy community that almost was
Poehler and Lee revisit several projects they worked on together, including Old Soul, the Natasha Lyonne pilot that did not get picked up. The premise, as Poehler describes it, was Lyonne as the youngest person in a group of much older people, with a cast that included Fred Willard, Richard Benjamin, Ellen Burstyn, Marla Gibbs, and Rita Moreno.
Lee’s main memory is Rita Moreno telling her she was on her phone too much. Poehler counters with her own Charles Grodin story: he told her the same thing on a movie set, and she put the phone down like she had been handed a sacred note from the elders.
That small exchange is very Good Hang: generational, affectionate, self-mocking, and rooted in show-business oral history. It also reminds listeners how much of an actor’s career is made of strange almosts: pilots not picked up, great casts that disappear, long days waiting on sets, and memories that survive more vividly than the project itself.
Then comes Sisters, the 2015 comedy starring Poehler and Tina Fey. Lee remembers the long shoot, the sinkhole set, the waiting, and the little plywood structures built for cast members to sit in while everyone waited around. Poehler apologizes, and Lee jokingly accepts.
That section is funny for industry reasons. It exposes how chaotic comedy filmmaking can be: huge casts, long improvised scenes, background actors trapped for days, union protections, and the absurd architecture of production delays.
But the Sisters conversation becomes much more important when they discuss Lee’s nail salon character, Hae Won.
The Sisters nail salon scene: why Greta Lee thinks it still works
TheWrap’s coverage focused on this part of the interview, and understandably so. Lee and Poehler talk about a scene from Sisters in which Poehler’s character Maura tries to connect with Lee’s nail technician character Hae Won, including struggling to pronounce her name. Some viewers have revisited the scene with discomfort because it appears to play near Asian stereotyping. Lee’s answer is thoughtful because she does not flatten the issue. She says she understands why the conversation around the scene is tricky, but she still loves the character because she knows her deeply.
The key phrase is “status is inverted.” Lee argues that the scene works because Hae Won is not powerless. The joke is not simply “Asian nail technician speaks accented English.” The joke is also Maura’s white-liberal over-eagerness, her desire to connect, her self-conscious savior energy, and the way Hae Won controls the interaction more than Maura realizes.
That distinction matters. Comedy about identity often depends on who has status inside the scene, not only on what identity markers are visible from the outside. Lee’s defense is not that the scene is beyond critique. It is that the scene gave her character knowledge, agency, and comic control. She saw an opportunity to play someone true to experiences she recognized, and she trusted that the comedy came from a real social inversion.
This may be the most culturally substantive moment in the episode. It touches on representation, stereotype, authorship, insider knowledge, and the difference between a character being mocked and a character doing the mocking.
Poehler’s presence makes the conversation more interesting because she is implicated in the scene too. Her character is the person trying and failing to perform sensitivity correctly. The fact that Poehler and Lee can talk about it directly, without defensiveness, is part of why the exchange lands.
Russian Doll: the iconic reset line and the chemistry with Natasha Lyonne
Poehler and Lee’s Russian Doll discussion is another highlight because it shows how Lee’s comedy persona became essential to a show built on repetition, death, friendship, and metaphysical chaos.
Lee played Maxine, the glittering party-host friend who greets Natasha Lyonne’s Nadia at the start of each reset. Poehler, who produced Russian Doll with Lyonne and Leslye Headland, explains that Lee’s character functioned as a reset point — a kind of home base. She is sparkly, eccentric, and party-ready, but also safe.
Lee admits she initially said no because she did not know how to say the same line again and again. She asked whether they could shoot it once and reuse it. Poehler said no. The line became iconic because repetition demanded tiny variations while still anchoring the show’s looping structure.
What is most affecting, though, is Lee’s description of acting with Lyonne. She says there is something different about working with Natasha, something immediate and locking-in. She does not claim she created an elaborate backstory for every loop. Instead, she says it was about friendship and connection.
That is a better explanation than over-intellectualizing the role. Russian Doll works because beneath its puzzle-box construction is a raw question: who keeps pulling you back into life? Lee’s Maxine is one answer.
Past Lives: Greta Lee on stillness, language, and the terror of being watched
The Past Lives section is the emotional center of the episode. Poehler calls it one of her favorite films of the past five or ten years, and her admiration is palpable. She talks about the film’s meditative quality, its rhythm, and the way characters watch and are watched.
Lee explains that making Past Lives felt singular. She knew they were making something that would be “something,” but she was also taking enormous risks. She had never been number one on a call sheet for a film. She had not done that kind of realism. She had to act in Korean, which carried personal weight. CBS News previously reported that Lee described speaking Korean as deeply personal and something she had once mentally separated from work.
One of Lee’s sharpest observations is that she had to turn off her instinct to improvise and fill silence with jokes. In comedy, silence can feel like a vacuum begging for rescue. In Past Lives, silence is the point. The camera stays on her face. Nothing obvious happens. Everything happens.
Poehler immediately relates because she, too, finds stillness difficult. The exchange becomes a craft conversation about comic performers entering dramatic realism. Comedy trains actors to generate, respond, fill, heighten, and relieve tension. Past Lives asks the actor to remain open while tension accumulates without release.
That is why Lee’s performance in the film was so widely admired. She does not “show” emotion in the obvious way. She lets the film hold her face long enough for the viewer to project, observe, and eventually feel the weight of what is not said. The episode helps explain how unnatural that can feel for a performer trained in speed and wit.
Fashion, red carpets, and acting under the gaze
Poehler then connects Past Lives to a broader question: what does it mean to be looked at? For an actor, being watched is part of the job. But Lee’s public image also includes fashion. Poehler calls her a fashion icon, praises her red-carpet presence, and brings up the confidence required to withstand the gaze.
Lee’s answer is revealing: posing is acting. She frames fashion presentation as character work. The red carpet is not pure self-expression; it is a performance of self-possession. She says she always wanted to be a male character actor, one of the guys, which adds an interesting tension to the way she has been received as glamorous, stylish, and visually iconic.
Poehler makes a connection to Dae, Lee’s Past Lives co-star Teo Yoo’s character? The transcript’s phrasing is messy here, but Poehler’s point is clear: Lee has a grounded, almost baller-like confidence when she is being watched. Lee credits the people she works with and her own knowledge of what she likes to wear.
This section could easily become shallow, but it does not, because it ties fashion to performance. Lee’s image is not treated as separate from her acting. It is another arena where she uses presence, framing, stillness, and control.
Toy Story 5: Greta Lee as Lilypad, the iPad villain
The promotional reason for the episode is Toy Story 5, and Lee’s role as Lilypad is one of the biggest pieces of news for listeners. She tells Poehler she plays the main new villain: an iPad-like device named Lilypad.
By late June 2026, that role was no longer just a future tease. Toy Story 5 had opened in theaters on June 19, and coverage described Lilypad as the smart tablet that competes with the toys for Bonnie’s attention. People notes that Lee’s character is a frog-shaped smart tablet who becomes the antagonist to the toys, while Reuters frames the film as a story about electronics replacing traditional play in children’s lives.
Lee says the film is good and emotionally effective, especially because of Joan Cusack’s work as Jessie. She jokes that if you like Past Lives, you will love Toy Story 5, which is both absurd and weirdly plausible given Pixar’s long history of making adults cry about toys, time, memory, and obsolescence.
The Toy Story 5 conversation also connects back to the episode’s mothering thread. A movie about children, toys, tablets, attention, and emotional attachment lands differently when discussed by two mothers who have spent years negotiating screens, bodies, play, outside time, and exhaustion. Lee’s villain is not just “technology bad.” According to People’s coverage of Lee’s comments elsewhere, she has described Lily as flawed but well-intentioned, someone who believes she knows what is best.
That nuance fits Lee. She is not interested in a flat villain. Even when playing a tablet, she seems drawn to the human contradiction: good intentions, control issues, mistakes, charisma, and a desire to be useful.
The episode’s funniest final turn: stain-removal videos and gardening advice
Near the end, Poehler asks Lee what she is watching, reading, or listening to for pleasure. Lee’s answer is wonderfully anticlimactic: YouTube stain-removal videos. Specifically, ink-stain removal.
It is a perfect late-episode detail because it refuses celebrity polish. After Past Lives, Dior shows, Calvin Klein abs, Pixar, and red carpets, the episode lands on a man explaining how to remove ink. Poehler and Lee watch, react, and admire the practical emergency structure of the video.
Then the conversation shifts back to gardening. Poehler says she is growing lettuce; Lee warns her that lettuce is hard, especially in heat, because it bolts and gets bitter. Poehler clarifies she is gardening on the East Coast, not in L.A., which reassures Lee somewhat.
The ending matters because it brings the episode full circle. Lee arrives with produce and leaves by giving gardening advice. The glamorous actor becomes the practical friend. The episode refuses to close on the official project, the awards bait, or the prestige film. It closes on lettuce.
What the episode reveals about Greta Lee
The episode reveals several versions of Greta Lee at once.
First, there is Greta Lee the comic technician: fast, dry, self-aware, able to puncture praise before it becomes too heavy.
Second, there is Greta Lee the laborer: the actor who came through restaurants, theater, auditions, pilots, long shoots, and physically punishing scenes.
Third, there is Greta Lee the daughter of immigrants: someone whose relationship to language, family obligation, and public success is funny but also emotionally complex.
Fourth, there is Greta Lee the image-maker: a performer who understands fashion, stillness, and the red carpet as forms of acting.
Fifth, there is Greta Lee the mother and gardener: exhausted, outside, tan, practical, and apparently ready to tell you not to grow lettuce in the wrong climate.
That multiplicity is why the episode works. Poehler does not try to reduce Lee to one identity. She lets her be a former hostess, a theater kid, a Korean American actor, a fashion icon, a Pixar villain, a mom, a friend, a comedy performer, and a person who watches stain-removal videos.
Amy Poehler as interviewer: why the format fits this guest
Poehler’s hosting style is central to the episode’s success. Good Hang is officially described as a weekly show where Poehler welcomes celebrities and fun people to talk about careers, mutual friends, shared enthusiasms, and what has been making them laugh; the show is explicitly not trying to make listeners better or give advice.
That mission can sometimes sound intentionally lightweight, but with a guest like Lee, the lightness becomes a feature. Poehler is not trying to break news, corner her guest, or produce a viral confession. She creates the conditions for specificity. The most revealing moments come because the interview feels safe enough to wander: artichokes lead to restaurants, restaurants lead to acting, acting leads to drowning, drowning leads to motherhood, motherhood leads to running, running leads to Tron, and somehow all of it makes sense.
Poehler is also unusually good at praising another performer without making it awkward. She repeatedly tells Lee she is talented, beautiful, funny, stylish, and important, but she balances that with jokes about frozen shoulder, Diet Coke, and her own avoidance of ice skating. The admiration never becomes solemn.
For a guest like Lee, who deflects grand statements, that balance is necessary. Poehler lets the serious work be named, then immediately gives Lee an escape hatch through comedy.
Best moments from the episode
The best moment for comedy fans is the Sisters discussion, especially Lee’s explanation of why Hae Won is in control. It is the rare podcast moment that adds a useful interpretive layer to a scene people already know.
The best moment for Past Lives fans is Lee explaining how hard it was to stop improvising and let the camera stay on her face. It is a compact acting lesson disguised as a casual confession.
The best moment for Russian Doll fans is the discussion of Maxine as the reset and Lee’s chemistry with Natasha Lyonne.
The best moment for Toy Story fans is the confirmation and discussion of Lilypad as the main new villain, especially Lee’s praise for Joan Cusack and the emotional weight of Jessie’s story.
The funniest small moment is probably Poehler rejecting eggplant moments after Lee proudly brings it from her garden.
The most relatable moment is Lee watching stain-removal videos because she is tired and needs low-stakes practical content.
Is this episode worth listening to?
Yes — especially if you like actor interviews that are more about process and personality than pure promotion.
For Greta Lee fans, it is essential listening because it connects so many pieces of her career: Past Lives, Russian Doll, The Morning Show, Girls, Broad City, Sisters, Toy Story 5, early theater, and restaurant work. For Amy Poehler fans, it is a strong example of why Good Hang has become one of the more successful celebrity interview podcasts: Poehler’s friendships and professional history allow conversations to start casual and then deepen without announcing that they are deep.
For listeners only interested in Toy Story 5, the episode includes some useful context, but it is not a Pixar-only interview. It is better understood as a Greta Lee career conversation timed around Toy Story 5.
For listeners interested in comedy, identity, and performance, the Sisters and Past Lives sections are the core reasons to listen.
FAQ
What episode of Good Hang with Amy Poehler is Greta Lee on?
Greta Lee appears on the June 23, 2026 episode titled “Greta Lee Lives in L.A. and Grows Vegetables Now,” also listed simply as “Greta Lee” on some podcast platforms. The official Ringer page lists the runtime as 1 hour 12 minutes.
Who hosts the Greta Lee episode of Good Hang?
The episode is hosted by Amy Poehler. Alison Roman appears in the opening segment to talk about Lee and suggest a question before the main interview.
What does Greta Lee play in Toy Story 5?
Greta Lee voices Lilypad, a smart tablet character who challenges the toys for Bonnie’s attention. People describes Lilypad as the ultimate antagonist to the toys, while Reuters frames the film around Bonnie’s pressure to swap toys for a high-tech tablet.
Did Greta Lee really work at Momofuku?
Yes. In the episode, Lee discusses working at Momofuku in New York, and People reported that she worked there on and off for about five years beginning in 2007 before her acting career fully took off.
What does Greta Lee say about the Sisters nail salon scene?
Lee says she understands why the scene can be tricky to discuss, but she believes it works because the status is inverted and her character, Hae Won, is in control. TheWrap covered this part of the interview in detail.
Does the episode discuss Past Lives?
Yes. Poehler praises Past Lives extensively, and Lee talks about the challenge of acting in Korean, being number one on a call sheet, doing realism, and learning not to fill silence with jokes.
Does the episode discuss Russian Doll?
Yes. Poehler and Lee discuss Lee’s role as Maxine, the repeated reset line, and Lee’s connection with Natasha Lyonne.
What is the overall theme of the episode?
The episode is about Greta Lee’s evolution as a performer, but its deeper theme is control: controlling a room as a hostess, surrendering control as a dramatic actor, controlling an image on the red carpet, losing control while pretending to drown, and playing a controlling tech villain in Toy Story 5.