Havana Rose Liu Is Doing Fame Her Way

Jacket, Chanel. Head jewel, Chanel High Jewelry.

Havana Rose Liu’s favorite piece from this ELLE shoot? The tiara, of course. “I felt like my childhood dreams of being a little princess were coming alive in real time,” the actress says of the Chanel High Jewelry showstopper. Funny enough, the collection Liu modeled is called Reach for the Stars, which not only refers to the twinkling stones and cosmic details, but also Liu’s own rapid rise in the past few years. After breaking out in 2023’s Bottoms, the beloved sapphic comedy starring Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri, the NYU alum earned heartthrob status, made her off-Broadway debut, and appeared in one of Sundance’s buzziest films this year, Lurker, which opens in theaters everywhere today. The movie, too, is about reaching for stardom, in a much darker sense.

With comparisons to All About Eve and Saltburn, Lurker follows an L.A. shop clerk Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) who works his way into pop star Oliver’s (Archie Madekwe) inner circle. After the two casually meet in his store, Matthew rises the ranks from a new acquaintance to Oliver’s personal videographer, embedding himself in the singer’s crew of creatives and hangers-on. Liu plays Shai, Oliver’s manager who keeps his squad in check and who eventually catches onto Matthew’s shady behavior. She’s the lone woman in a group of dudes who party, play video games, and crash together on a tour bus. “She’s mommy,” Liu jokes on Zoom, wearing a cream crochet top from a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn.

The cool indie, picked up by MUBI and directed by The Bear and Beef’s Alex Russell in his first-time feature, is both stylish and sharp. It captures the nuances of fame in the era of social media, which made Liu think more deeply about stardom, especially at a time when she’s being thrust further into the public eye. “The core, nuanced relationship between a fan and a star is really much more complex than how people like to narrativize it,” she says. Lurker also arrives in a moment when parasocial relationships and fandom culture are arguably at their peak, with the ability to influence economies and public opinion. “That’s the funny thing, the projection of the power onto the star comes from the fan,” Liu adds later. “The power that they have comes from all the individuals who support them.” In other words, the two need each other.

Liu is still grappling with her place in all of this. Thankfully, her encounters with her fans have been “very pure and very wonderful.” And as someone who rarely uses social media, the biggest interactions she’s had with them were outside the stage door during her play All Nighter this year. She hasn’t had “a Lurker-esque experience,” but working on the film has made her slightly more cautious. In fact, the script came her way at a fortuitous moment. “I think the subject matter was something I was chewing on at the time,” she says. “It was right after Bottoms had really started to proliferate in the culture, and I felt like I was having a new relationship to the public where I was being recognized on the street in a different way. I felt like my life that had been private and mine became something else.”

During that time, she explains, “I had to really think about people’s intentions in a little bit more of a, honestly, paranoid way for a little while. I think that the script came into my inbox and allowed me to really process a lot of those things.” The film takes those feelings to a more extreme level, but it was “a metaphor for what was going on, and how stardom can shape people’s lives, and how fandom is such an interesting, possibly positive, possibly insidious, and possibly neutral way that our society functions.” She reveals later without sharing too much, “I just have been burned two times or so with that mentality now, that people might have an idea of who I am before I know that they do.”

Rings, Chanel High Jewelry.

Jacket, pants, Chanel. Necklace, ring, Chanel High Jewelry.

The challenging part is, Liu doesn’t want to close herself off to new relationships either. “My favorite thing is that you could be on the subway and meet your new best friend,” she says. And who wouldn’t want to be hers? The actress has an arresting onscreen presence–aided by her emotive green eyes and billowing brown curls–whether as a high school cheerleader in Bottoms or a composition student in Tuner (or even as the mystery woman in Timothée Chalamet’s Chanel commercial). Still, with all the attention, Liu attempts to stay grounded. “I just try to be as unplugged as possible,” she says. In fact, a week before our interview, she was traveling with a friend and went to a retreat where she was completely off the grid. (She keeps details sparse to respect the sanctuary’s privacy.)

As romantic as being offline seems, there is an undeniable a pressure to be more online in Hollywood now. “It’s a funny thing to reconcile,” she says. “I’m still trying to figure out what relationship I want to have to [social media]. I’m worried that I stay away from it out of fear, more than out of self-care, self-discipline...It’s not totally in my nature to self-promote in the way that I feel like you’re supposed to.” She’s still figuring out how to “try to be okay with being a little more seen.”

Earring, Chanel High Jewelry.

Her friends have kindly kept her updated on the TikTok fancams and fan edits of her floating around the internet. She’s amused by the posts (“People are so creative and so genius,” she says), but she’s not sure how to process being an object of so many people’s affection. “God, I would love to wake up and look in the mirror and be like, ‘Heartthrob,’” she quips, pretending to point and wink at her reflection, “but that’s not how I feel.”

Liu, who was street cast to model before she landed acting jobs, thought she’d end up opening her own art therapy practice. (Her create-your-own-major at NYU Gallatin was “the intersection between art, activism, and wellness.”) Now a few years in, she has realized that the best part of the job is diving into different worlds with each new role. Coming up is Ruby in Tuner, part music drama, part heist thriller, which stars Dustin Hoffman and Liu’s fellow next-big-thing Leo Woodall, directed by Navalny’s Daniel Roher in his debut feature. On Monday, audiences at Toronto Film Festival will meet Liu’s Ruby, an ambitious composition major at a New York conservatory who is tirelessly perfecting her final piece in hopes of working as a maestro’s apprentice.

Liu, who hadn’t played piano since middle school, had to train again. She practiced for three to four hours a day, for two and a half months, to learn the pieces in the film. While the audio in the movie is a mix of her playing and a professional recording, the shots of Liu at the piano are really her, with a hand double in some moments. The result is more than convincing: Liu thrusts her shoulders forward as she attacks the keys, her hands floating with a dramatic flair. In one scene, she sways so passionately her hair starts to fall out of its ponytail.

T-shirt, Chanel. Rings, necklace, Chanel High Jewelry.

Necklace, Chanel High Jewelry.

Working with a legend like Hoffman was something she couldn’t really prepare for. “I remember the first day we worked together, I was going to pee myself I was so intimidated, and also excited, and also just was having an out-of-body experience. I remember he just kept improvising in such wild directions. To keep up with his rollercoaster was so fun.”

Coincidentally, Liu has a few other music-related projects in the works, including a cameo in Jesse Eisenberg’s upcoming musical and a part in Once director John Carney’s next project. She promises it wasn’t intentional, but she does jokingly wonder whether she should record her own music next. (“You heard it here first,” she jokes.) Aside from an upcoming holiday movie with Michelle Pfeiffer, Liu will also appear in Hal & Harper, a series debuting on MUBI in October, starring Mark Ruffalo, Lili Reinhart, and writer/director Cooper Raiff, best known for the Sundance breakout Cha Cha Real Smooth. Working with up-and-coming creatives and filmmakers seems to be a trend in Liu’s career, and it is intentional.

“I do really love the process of watching someone step into a passion that they’ve been thinking about, or dreaming about, and then actually be able to do it…I find that really rewarding,” she says. That also applied to her experience filming Bottoms, from rising director Emma Seligman and now-It Girls Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott. “Ayo and Rachel, their work ethic is incredibly inspiring, as well as their freedom and joy that they bring to the process. Emma as well,” Liu says. “Emma is now one of my dearest friends.”

Jacket, Chanel. Earrings, necklaces, Chanel High Jewelry.

Earring, Chanel High Jewelry.

Liu, who is part Chinese, is making her mark in an interesting time in Hollywood. Representation is becoming more diverse (now seven years after Crazy Rich Asians made history in theaters), but DEI efforts are also under attack. According to a USC Annenberg report published last year, Asian characters made up 18.4 percent of speaking roles in film and TV in 2023 and dropped to 13.5 percent in 2024. Liu is surprised by the statistic.

“In America, we tend to pendulum to such extremes in every way…There is a certain level to which it feels like people get on board when it feels like a fad to be in support of something. The long-term and sustainable effects of change are hard to keep consistent,” she says. But she has hope. “I’m also conscious of the fact that change often works like this. I try to leave a little space for moments to have a dip so that we can rise again.”

Coat, Chanel. Rings, earring, Chanel High Jewelry.

And she’s still grateful to see many other Asians in the industry in the meantime. “I feel like I’m in these rooms with a lot of my other Asian friends who are in this career, so I feel like I feel close to a community that’s building here,” she says, pointing to the organization Gold House as an example. “I have a lot of faith that we will then make that number different in the next year.”

Liu might have fantasized about being a princess when she was a kid, but today, she doesn’t really have any dream roles. Things have worked out just fine without them anyway. “I try really hard not to hold onto a vision for the future, because my whole life I’ve been constantly surprised by where I’ve ended up,” she says. “I think I just like to stay as open as possible.” If there’s one goal she knows she wants to achieve down the line, it’s to keep immersing herself in her work. “I get to live so many lives in one,” she says, “which is the biggest privilege.”

Hair by Shon Hyungsun Ju and makeup by Shayna Goldberg, both at The Wall Group; set design by Pierre-Alexandre Fillaire at Artem Project; produced by Julien Pegourier at Myself Production.

A version of this story appears in the October 2025 issue of ELLE.

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