P.S. Love Yourself,
xoxo
lana condor
t was a hot summer day in 2017, and Lana Condor sat in the doorway of her tiny studio in Torrance, California, desperately waiting for a phone call. The whole apartment was the size of a dressing room, entirely bare apart from a minifridge and a mattress on the floor. The stove had to be lit with a match, and when the room became too warm, Condor would open the front door and sit outside; she didn’t have an air conditioner and it was her only way to cool off.
For a week, she had spent every day pacing back and forth in the apartment, calling her agents, hoping for news about a role she’d auditioned for that she couldn’t stop thinking about. But each day she got the same answer: Nothing yet. And then, as she sat outside, her phone rang. She had been cast as Lara Jean Covey in Netflix’s film, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.
“I kept asking them, ‘Can you repeat it? Can you repeat it? Can you repeat it?’” Condor, now 22, recalls. “I believed it because I knew how hard I worked, and I also didn’t believe it because I was like, ‘This is what dreams are made of.’”
When it premiered in August of 2018, To All the Boys became an instant hit—and so did Lana Condor. The film became Netflix’s most-watched original movie of the year, garnering more than 80 million streams. And now the Netflix gods are blessing us with a sequel, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, which drops on February 12.
Ahead of the new film’s release, Condor posed for the cover of StyleCaster's Self-Love Issue in sunny Santa Monica. In between takes, the actress chatted candidly about P.S. I Still Love You, her skyrocketing career and the blessing and burden of being an Asian American actor in Hollywood.
I
I’m not any less loved.
I didn’t lose in any way. I won.
Condor still exhibits the wide-eyed exuberance that helped get her cast in To All the Boys in the first place, and it’s evident from the moment she arrives for the photoshoot. In the elevator, she mistakes someone’s building badge for a Tamagotchi. In the hallway, she stops to gawk at a shirtless portrait of Chadwick Boseman. But while her youthfulness remains intact, her life looks quite different. She no longer lives in a studio in Torrance, but in a house in Seattle with her boyfriend, musician Anthony De La Torre, and their dog. (And yes, she has a working stove, a proper bed frame and even an air conditioner.)
She boasts eight million Instagram followers—about 80 times more than she had before To All the Boys. She’s traveled to Vietnam with Michelle Obama to raise awareness for the Girls Opportunity Alliance. And she has tons of famous new friends, too. The members of K-pop band BLACKPINK (whose song is featured in P.S. I Still Love You) DM’d her last year to personally invite her to their concert. “They were like, ‘We’re so proud of what you’re doing. We’re big fans,’' Condor says. “And I was like, ‘I’m the biggest fan of you guys!’ They’re the cutest girls. I still can’t believe it.”
As a makeup artist brushes shimmer over her eyelids and a hairstylist curls her hair, Condor reminisces about what her life was like before To All the Boys changed, well, just about everything.
I’m not any less loved.
I didn’t lose in any way. I won.
Condor and her brother were adopted from an orphanage in Can Tho, Vietnam, when she was four months old. Most of her childhood was spent in Whidbey Island, Washington, a “hippie farmland” an hour from Seattle, where she caught salmon with her dad and played in the forest with her brother. When she was in seventh grade, the family moved to New York City, and she enrolled at a private Catholic school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was a culture shock, to say the least.
It was around that time that Condor says she became acutely aware of her Asianness after another student called her a “chink.”
“It was like a shot in the face,” Condor says, admitting that she had to ask her mom what the slur meant. “Very quickly, that blissfully unaware childhood innocence was smashed.” The irony? Condor’s bully was also Asian. “It makes me sad because maybe there’s a world where she was called that by another bully and felt the need to pass that hurt down to me,” Condor says. “I was like, ‘If I am different, so are you.’ We should be aligned, not pit ourselves against each other.”
Aside from a conversation she had with her mom about genes when she was 8, Condor’s parents had not explicitly discussed her adoption. “I almost feel like it was implied,” she says. But she doesn’t shy away from talking about it, especially when it comes to correcting misconceptions about adoption. “People say, ‘No, no, no, no. I mean your real parents.’ And I’m like, ‘My parents are my real parents.’ I know no other parents than my real parents, who are Bob and Mary Condor,” Condor says. “I’m not any less loved. I didn’t lose in any way. I won.”
It’s almost noon on the day of our photoshoot, and Condor’s dressing room is silent aside from the whir of a manicure machine and the occasional clipping noise as her nail artist puts the final touches on her fingertips. In a few minutes, her entourage will rush in to dress her in a dramatic, pink Pamella Roland confection. But for now, the mood is calm.
Since To All the Boys, Condor has been compared incessantly to Lara Jean. She’s called by the character’s name almost as much as her own, and there are scores of tweets that blur the line between where Lara Jean stops, and Lana Condor begins. But she asserts that in real life, she’s quite different from Lara Jean.
For starters, she says her relationship with boyfriend Anthony De La Torre is far more romantic than her on-screen loves. And though Condor considers De La Torre to be more of a John Ambrose—a shy, sensitive type rather than a machismo jock—she does acknowledge some similarities to Peter Kavinsky. She references a line from the book where Kitty tells Lara Jean: He looks at you a lot, Lara Jean. When you're not paying attention. He looks at you, to see if you're having a good time.
“That’s what my boyfriend does. He is very concerned about my wellbeing all the time,” Condor says. “He looks at me when I’m not looking, and he’s always trying to check-in and make sure I’m OK.”
In contrast to Lara Jean, Condor prefers thrillers to romance novels. Her style is more mature and trendy than quirky and preppy. And her dream role is to act in a war movie—something she can’t even picture Lara Jean watching.
Lana Condor has more of a voice, too. Since her success, she’s been announced as an #AerieREAL Role Model, launched a girls’ scholarship with the Asia Foundation and become one of Hollywood’s most vocal young Asian American activists.
“Lara Jean is really quiet and shy, and she’s still trying to find her voice,” Condor says. “And so am I. But I’m much more loud.”
Among the most common requests she heard from casting directors was to read in Mandarin—even though she doesn’t speak it. “Casting rooms are sometimes like, ‘But she doesn’t speak Mandarin?!’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I’m not Chinese.’ Just because I’m Asian, you assume I speak Mandarin? That’s weird. Because when I read the breakdown, you said you needed an Asian American actress. You didn’t say specifically [Chinese or Mandarin-speaking].”
Before To All the Boys, Condor was frustrated with where she was in her career. She read for lead parts but was always cast in supporting roles. “You’re either a shy computer nerd or you’re the comedic relief best friend,” she says. She auditioned for the lead in Disney+’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series and was almost cast in Marvel’s Runaways on Hulu. But the rejection that hurt most was when she was a runner-up to play Rose Tico in 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi. She was so close to landing it that she chemistry read with John Boyega.
“This was before The Force Awakens came out, and they were already reading for the sequel,” Condor recalls. “He was eating Sugarfish, and I had a meeting to just get to know him. I remember looking at him and being like, ‘He has no idea what’s about to happen to his life. He is going to be the lead in Star Wars. That is so cool.’ And then he blew up overnight.”
Condor wasn’t cast in Star Wars, but she still had her overnight come-up when To All the Boys premiered the following year. “Had I done Star Wars, I wouldn’t have been able to do To All the Boys, so that’s an example of one door closes and another opens,” she points out.
In the beloved original Netflix film (based on a book series by Jenny Han), Condor plays Lara Jean Covey, a romance novel buff and high school junior whose life is upended when her younger sister mails Lara Jean’s secret love letters to the boys she wrote them about, but never intended to send.
Condor didn’t immediately grasp the movie's massive success. She had been in Canada filming Syfy’s Deadly Class when it premiered. It wasn’t until two weeks later, in the sauna at her gym, that she realized how monumentally her life was about to change. “I was sitting there, butt-ass naked, and these three girls were like, ‘Oh my God! You’re Lara Jean!’” Condor recalls. “I told my publicist, who was like, ‘Yeah, Lana. Can’t really be running around in your birthday suit anymore.’”
P.S. I Still Love You centers on Lara Jean’s relationships with two of the recipients of her love letters: Peter Kavinsky, the new boyfriend with whom she becomes official at end of To All the Boys; and John Ambrose McClaren, her middle school crush who comes back into the picture. Though the story screams classic teen love triangle, Condor insists P.S. I Still Love You is more layered than that.
She points to a moment when Lara Jean and her sister Kitty dress in traditional Korean hanboks for a family reunion. The scene, for which Condor took bowing lessons and spoke Korean, reminded her of when her white parents would dress her in Vietnamese áo dàis as a kid. “I really appreciated that we could tell the story of a mixed family,” she says. “John Corbett, who plays our dad, is Caucasian, and him being so willing to jump in a culture and do it justice was so meaningful to me.”
But perhaps the most challenging scene for Condor to shoot was one that didn’t have any lines at all. It’s a simple moment where Lara Jean walks down a staircase in a princess-worthy dress, and she knew it would be particularly meaningful to the Asian American community. “I’m standing there like, ‘Don’t eff this up,’ and it hit me, ‘Oh my God. I’m going to walk down these stairs and have this Cinderella moment. But I am Asian,’” she says. “I want other Asian American girls and boys to see that moment and be like, ‘Yes! We can have this grand stairway entrance!’”
As for the third To All the Boys movie, which has already been filmed and is based on Han’s book, Always and Forever, Lara Jean, Condor can’t reveal much. But she hints that much of it will follow the book’s storyline, in which Lara Jean and her boyfriend face a difficult choice after they’re accepted to different colleges. “Lara Jean chooses herself and makes decisions based on what’s right for her. A lot of our movie is based on those tough questions: Should I be safe, or should I be brave?” she says.
Our movie is based on those tough questions: Should I be safe or should I be brave?
Our movie is based on those tough questions: Should I be safe or should I be brave?
By Jason Pham
P.S. Love Yourself,
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Though she had been a ballet dancer her whole life, it wasn’t until the family moved to Los Angeles several years later that Condor considered pursuing a career as a performer. With only a drama class on her resume and zero knowledge of how the industry worked, it took her two years to find an agent, but when she finally did, it didn’t take long to book her first movie role, playing Jubilee in 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse. It wasn’t just her inaugural film; it was her first time on set, in front of a camera and on a red carpet. “I thought you had to pay for craft services. I was so green,” she recalls.
It was also Condor’s initial brush with controversy. After X-Men: Apocalypse premiered, many in the Asian American community were critical of how few lines she and other Asian characters had. Condor, who admits that she shot “way more” scenes than what appeared in the final cut, didn’t initially understand the backlash.
“In the moment, I was happy for any part I could get,” she says. “Now, if that same experience happened, I would be pretty discouraged and upset and feel there was an injustice.”
The movie went on to become one of the X-Men franchise’s highest-grossing films, but for Condor, steady work was elusive. It took her nine months to book her next role, and many of the parts she auditioned for were riddled with Asian stereotypes, from nail salon workers to characters with exaggerated accents.
“A lot of times people assume I have an accent, and I don’t,” she says. In one audition, she was told to act more like Hello Kitty. “I was like, ‘Hmm. What? You mean the cat with no mouth because when they developed Hello Kitty, they didn’t want women to speak?’” she says. In another, she was asked to resemble “walking anime,” which she simulated by fake giggling and covering her mouth with her hand. “They wanted me to be so cutesy because that’s what they think Asians are,” she says.
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She boasts eight million Instagram followers—about 80 times more than she had before To All the Boys. She’s traveled to Vietnam with Michelle Obama to raise awareness for the Girls Opportunity Alliance. And she has tons of famous new friends, too. The members of K-pop band BLACKPINK (whose song is featured in P.S. I Still Love You) DM’d her last year to personally invite her to their concert. “They were like, ‘We’re so proud of what you’re doing. We’re big fans,’' Condor says. “And I was like, ‘I’m the biggest fan of you guys!’ They’re the cutest girls. I still can’t believe it.”
As a makeup artist brushes shimmer over her eyelids and a hairstylist curls her hair, Condor reminisces about what her life was like before To All the Boys changed, well, just about everything.
Dress: Pamella Roland. Boots: All Saints.
Shirt & Pants: ALC. Blazer: Anciela London.
Blazer: Valentina Shah. Sweater: Equipment. Shirt: Cos.
Sweater & Skirt: Michael Kors. Boots: Giuseppe.
Photographer: Michael Buckner. Stylist: Tara Swennen.
Hairstylist: Kat Thompson for R & CO.
Makeup Artist: Anton Khachaturian for LORAC Cosmetics. Manicurist: Tom Bachik.
Entertainment Editor: Jason Pham. Fashion Editor: Mia Maguire.
Beauty Writer: Elizabeth Denton. Graphic Designer: Cierra Miller.
Video: Reshma Gopaldas, Laura Valencia, Jared Cleary, Michelle Rosen
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click to shop lana's favorite makeup
Explore the rest of STYLECASTER's Self-Love issue here
click to shop lana's favorite makeup
Explore the rest of STYLECASTER's Self-Love issue here.