Greta Lee Is The Morning Show's New "Take No Prisoners Kind of Boss"
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"How would you feel if, all of the sudden, due to some unforeseen circumstance, you're under lockdown, and the only people outside of your immediate family that you are seeing every day are Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon?"
Last year, Greta Lee found herself in that exact, oddly specific scenario, after joining the cast of The Morning Show's second season. The series was one of the very first to return to filming after the start of the pandemic, when much of the country was still in isolation. "What a way to jump in and be the new kid at school," she says, laughing.
Lee, who is known for her performances in Inside Amy Schumer, Girls, and Russian Doll—yes, she still gets asked about her iconic "sweet birthday baby" line—plays Stella Bak, the new president of the UBA news division, a millennial boss tasked with cleaning up the department.
"Stella comes in to change the way UBA runs. She challenges the corporate world, she challenges Cory [Ellison, played by Billy Crudup]. She challenges the chairman and realizes how very difficult it is to penetrate the old guard," explains Mimi Leder, the show's executive producer, who says that Lee was "exactly what we were looking for" in the role. "She's an incredible comedian and an incredible dramatic actress. She can do it all, and play with the best of them."
Here, Lee introduces Stella, shares how she helped shape her character's wardrobe, and reveals what it was like filming a show about COVID in the middle of the pandemic.
Your character Stella, she is new this season. Tell me about her.
Stella Bak is the youngest and only female news president in UBA history. It's a big deal. She is someone who came from an online media company that was mostly catering to a Gen Z and Millennial audience. So she's bringing that perspective to UBA and she's basically the new Cory Ellison after Cory takes on a different position. And she's awesome. She's super strong and ambitious. She's a visionary, she's a real take-no-prisoners kind of boss, and I think she's amazing.
Stella is an outsider and a woman of color coming into this organization after a crisis and helping to clean up. That’s something we’ve seen happen over and over again in real life.
I really did not take for granted the opportunity to lean into that discomfort and the complexity of that situation. And I so appreciated that from the get-go, it wasn't about presenting any sort of solution or ideal.
One of the questions we were asking is what happens when someone is wondering what she's willing and not willing to compromise in order to run a business, to be an effective boss. And it's very complicated, especially in terms of a young person, a young Asian American woman, coming in with the intent to rehabilitate this workplace from the ground up in terms of its toxicity, in terms of its systems of misogyny and racism, I mean all of it.
But, it's so interesting to me to look at well, how do we really do that? It's not, what happens? What's the step after that? You hire someone to come in, an outsider, but it's difficult. We have intergenerational conflicts, we have gender conflicts. And I love that we're able to look at all of that this season.
Is she inspired by anyone in real life in particular?
When we first got together and started talking about what could be possible for a woman like this, I was reading books like Uncanny Valley, or reading about Elizabeth Holmes, thinking about Mark Zuckerberg—really just looking at young people, both in tech and in media, and figuring out what's the most dynamic way to approach a character like this, and to really reflect this incredible moment that we are experiencing in real life. We have a record number of young people in leadership positions, a record number of female CEOs. But, we also wanted to make sure that she's flawed and she has a lot of conflicting things at play. It was really fun to figure out.
This season of The Morning Show is one of the first fictional representations of this historic period that we're in. How do you feel about shaping the narrative of this time moving forward?
Well, we were filming in the middle of the pandemic, so that felt very meta. We were very much in process of trying to figure out what was happening globally.
But I appreciated that the season wasn't just about COVID. They were also using the backdrop of the 2020 election, and being very true to the mess of that time. It was an unforeseen, unprecedented sandwich of so many incredibly stressful and intense things that we were all just trying to take as they came. Season one was incredibly prescient in terms of the #MeToo movement. And I think Kerry Ehrin and the rest of the producers were really smart and brave to want to reflect what was actually happening while it was happening, and to write as things were changing.
Stella has a very specific style. Were you involved in creating her aesthetic?
I have never had a wardrobe like this before. I mean, I do love clothes personally. And so it was a complete dream to wear exclusively Prada and Balenciaga and Chanel—like vintage Chanel. I just loved that they leaned into like she's a boss, she's a wunderkind, she does incredibly well. I mean, she's a killer. So thinking about what she would wear was so much fun. And yeah, I got to collaborate and think about that—and what modern workplace wear, what that looks like for a self-identifying kind of rule breaker and visionary was fun.
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