Swept Up In Havana Rose Liu

Havana Rose Liu is up to something. She’s got the glow of somebody caught up in the rush of a new project — which, at this moment, happens to be a lamp. Well, part of one. “I made a container for the lamp. I would love to learn the wiring, but I don’t have time for that,” she tells me on Zoom, sitting in a sunny corner of her home in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood. Luckily, she knows better than to go full electrician without some guidance. “I would die. I would be electrocuted. No interview for us.”

The 28-year-old actor is constantly working on DIY projects, even if she can never get around to finishing what she starts. “I’m just always fiddling with something,” she says. Growing up, the native New Yorker had plans to hand-make just about everything in her home. “I thought, ‘I will make the chairs. I will make the couch. I will make every bowl and dish and cup.’ But it turns out you need a lot of time, money, and resources, and skill to do all those things,” she says. “I hope when I’m 85, that will come true, but it’s just not in my books right now.” At the moment, home-improvement ambitions are more annoying than inspired. “I came home and was like, ‘What the f*ck is going on in here?’ There’s too many little things that I’ve made or half-made.”

She’s just returned from an off-the-grid retreat for an upcoming project. (She can’t really talk about it, except to say it was “incredibly amazing,” and that she’ll tell me everything in a year.) “Usually I come here and I lie on the floor as soon as I arrive and feel so happy to be in my house, but right now I feel a little bit wonky,” she says — some friends were staying in her place while she was gone, and her belongings are not in their usual places. She’s doing everything she can to get back in the groove: picking up her meditation and breathwork routines, trying to make a yoga habit stick, keeping her screen time low.

“I like to lose my phone and leave it in random places,” she says. “I’m so of our generation in a way that I really am aware of all of the bullsh*t of what’s unhealthy. If I’m not careful, I can go in a scroll hole for many hours. I lock into whatever I’m doing. I just really cannot.” She doesn’t even watch TV for that reason. “I find it so addictive. That’s why I mostly act in films.”

Movies — whether it’s the breakout sex comedy Bottoms or the celebrity-fandom thriller Lurker or last year’s holiday romp Oh. What. Fun. — are the perfect excuse to keep trying out niche hobbies. “I want to learn things, and the skill set needs to come from actually being forced to really learn it,” says Liu (who also starred in the off-Broadway college dramedy All Nighter last year). She doesn’t have to look far for inspiration: “Right now, I’d love to learn to be a furniture maker. That’s my dream role at the moment.”

“When I’m feeling most happy and safe and myself, I’m usually doing some side adventures.”

Her new film Tuner, in which she plays a music composition student named Ruthie, gave her a reason to take up piano, which she briefly played as a child. It also paralleled her real life — Liu’s character loses her grandmother, who was her closest connection to music. When Liu read for the role, she had recently lost her paternal grandmother, who had done the same in her own life.

“The character felt like an interesting container for a lot of the complexities of grief and drive that I had in that moment,” she says. “I had never felt more motivated to work, in a way, because I felt a desire to honor her in some capacity. But I had never felt more complicated about work because I just wanted to be nestled in my own grief. It felt like a very kindred or metadynamic experience — trying to build Ruthie and build this performance on behalf of my own grandmother.”

Liu describes herself as having “grandparent energy,” and her multigenerational relationships have been tentpoles in her life. Liu’s other grandmother, who was a poet, used to do writing exercises with her and her siblings, and Liu jokes that she’s “sort of perpetually writing a song” as a way to process her feelings about things. Her phone is full of such musical voice notes, but don’t expect to ever hear any of them: “No one’s ever going to see that sh*t.” I joke that after this, she’ll start getting questions about whether she’s dropping an album.

“You’ve absolutely f*cked me right now,” she says. “But then what happens? I’ll have to do it, and then maybe I’ll be really grateful for that. I don’t know. I’m open to anything in this life, a little.”

“This career is more like snorkeling than rock climbing. I’m really enjoying floating through this period of time, and I’m loving looking at all the coral.”

If she does go down that path, she can probably call in a few favors. Last year, she played as a fastidious museum guard in Lucy Dacus’ “Ankles” video, and in April, she briefly appeared in Laufey’s “Madwoman,” which also starred Hudson Williams, Lola Tung, Alysa Liu, and Megan Skiendiel from Katseye — a group the Internet has dubbed the “Wasian Avengers.”

Liu has been wanting to team up with Laufey for ages, so — despite a schedule conflict on the day of shooting — she found a way to be involved, making a cameo on a magazine cover as the ex of Williams’ character. Liu had been filming an upcoming A24 horror film, “and literally five minutes before I had to get on an airplane to go somewhere, my castmates Suzanna Son and Ferosa Mackenzie helped me put this shoot together,” she says. “They were like, ‘Look this way! Let’s put on the lipstick!’ It was the most fun thing ever. I was fully madwoman.”

It’s the same scrappy spirit that drives the rest of her life. “When I’m feeling most happy and safe and myself, I’m usually doing some side adventures,” she says. “I just get these creative itches.” In conversation, Liu is enthusiastic and curious, frequently flipping my questions back on me to ask about meditation, my own multigenerational friendships, and whether I play music. When I mention my desire to join a choir, she instantly jumps to make plans. “Sarah, I will join a choir with you,” she says. She considers herself an alto, which I note is the underrated backbone of the whole group. “I like to be that in my life,” Liu quips. “Let me be your backbone. I don’t have to be off soloing all the time.”

Hollywood wasn’t always the plan for Liu, who fell into acting when she was street cast while walking through Washington Square Park as a New York University student. In school, her interests were all over the map: She took classes in psychology, fine arts, food politics, literature, drama therapy, and performance art. Liu was curious about the intersection of art and mental health, particularly the therapeutic promise art could offer in social-justice movements to activists on the front lines. Acting triangulates all of these interests for her: “I just didn’t know what was right in front of me. I was studying everything around the thing.”

Now, she’s booked and busy. Her 2026 is stacked, with upcoming roles in films like the rom-com Power Ballad (with Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas) and the horror-thriller Her Private Hell (with Charles Melton and Sophie Thatcher). There’s also an untitled musical comedy with Jesse Eisenberg on the way. Still, “making it” isn’t really something on her agenda — she’d rather keep tinkering. “This career is more like snorkeling than rock climbing,” Liu says. “You’re not holding onto anything. You’re just sort of exploring. I don’t think that looking for a foothold has ever given me a sense of peace. Anytime I’ve tried to control or lock down my life in that way, it’s probably the most unstable I’ve felt. So I’m really enjoying floating through this period of time in this way, and I’m loving looking at all the coral.”

“I’m just like, ‘OK, if it sticks around, if this is supposed to be what I’m supposed to do more of’ — and right now I really hope it is,” she continues. “But if it’s not, then I will have my heartbreak time and see what’s around the corner.”

There’s always another sidequest to go down. “I really mean it. Can we figure out a choir?” she says before we hang up. “Maybe that’s where we are going to have all of our intergenerational friendships, too. Oh my God — we figured it all out!”

Top image credit: Balenciaga jacket.