“I think I have a very Machiavellian twinkle inside of me,” Chase Sui Wonders says with a smirk. The burgeoning actress’s most ruthless side jumps out and onto the screen in the acclaimed Apple TV+ series The Studio. It’s fiction, but is it really? Hollywood loves to tell stories about itself, and surprise, surprise—the series is a meta commentary on the film business doing just that. It obliterates the lines between fantasy and reality with the kind of witty humor that pokes fun at the industry’s self-seriousness in a way that only creator Seth Rogen could, all while featuring cameos from Hollywood heavyweights. Everyone from Zoë Kravitz to Martin Scorsese makes an appearance.
It’s easily one of the biggest roles of Sui Wonders’s career to date, and in it, she plays Quinn, a young, hyperambitious assistant turned executive who spares nothing to claw her way up the corporate ladder. Just like Quinn, Sui Wonders found herself with big shoes to fill. Not only was the actress stepping onto set as the wide-eyed newbie among comedy legends like Rogen, Kathryn Hahn, and Ike Barinholtz (she describes herself as “fresh meat”), but there also was no warm-up period before diving into filming her character’s most divisive arc. “The very first day, scene one was a scene of me and Ike screaming at each other in the episode where we tear each other’s heads off,” she says. Talk about a high-pressure moment.
“I’m obsessed with Ike,” she continues. “He’s a dear, dear friend now, but that was a crazy thing to jump into. You don’t really know your castmates as well, so I was like, ‘Nice to meet you, Ike’ and then spitting in his face.” While she admits to being scared in the moment, you’d never know Sui Wonders had any hint of nerves while watching the scene play out in episode five titled “The War.” That, I’m quickly gathering, is simply the Chase Sui Wonders magic. In fact, I think a part of her delights in being the underdog.
It might be her character Quinn who has to “buck up and find her sea legs,” as she puts it, but that’s also how Sui Wonders felt while costarring alongside a slew of comedy legends she’s always looked up to. Of course, I was curious to know who she was most starstruck by on a set filled with A-list name after A-list name. She replies instantly: “I can recite all of Kathryn Hahn’s monologues from Step Brothers and often do. That one was surreal just because here is a woman who is so unabashedly a freak but is also so hot while doing it.” Of course, Rogen and Evan Goldberg rank high for anyone born in the late ’90s. “I came of age with all of their movies: Knocked Up, Pineapple Express, Superbad. I actually think This Is the End is the last great American comedy,” Sui Wonders says.
It may be a big step up for the 28-year-old star, but she’s had the energy of Quinn in her all along. She grew up in suburban Detroit and was “kind of sheltered” before heading off to study film at Harvard, where she was the only girl in her program. “When I went to college, I experienced a whole new world,” she remembers. “I was meeting coastal elites for the first time and people who were so cultured. I felt like a fish out of water and then felt like I needed to prove something.”
It’s hard to tell sitting across from such an animated personality as hers, but Sui Wonders battled extreme shyness as a kid and didn’t speak for the first decade of life. Acting classes served as a way to come out of her shell. “I did a play in college. It got torn apart in the school newspaper. I was like, ‘How could anyone ever do this for a living? I don’t have thick enough skin.’ That’s when I decided I just want to write and direct,” she says. So she pivoted. After graduating with a degree in film production, she put all of her energy into getting her foot in the door, and nothing was too shameless for a young Sui Wonders. “I was knocking at that door a bunch of the times in every which way [and] sending cold emails to people I wasn’t supposed to be emailing. [I was] finding their emails on IMDb and sending them my spec script and then getting scolded by someone being like, ‘That’s so embarrassing that you did that.’ I just saw it as, ‘I’m young. People are going to assume I don’t know any better, so I might as well shoot my shot,'” she says. It turns out it was all worth it in the end. “There’s a bit of ruthlessness and lack of shame that comes from putting yourself out there so many times and getting rejected,” she tells me. I’m starting to realize her portrayal of Quinn isn’t quite so fictionalized, after all.
As for what The Studio gets right about Hollywood? “Obviously, it’s heightened, but I think it’s extraordinarily accurate,” she says. “There is a weird thing about studio execs coming to visit sets. Some are obsessed with movies and want to be an actor or director, and then there’s some studio execs who have zero film knowledge but just want to be around famous people. The obsession with fame also is a big one.” It may be exaggerated, but Sui Wonders concedes, “There will be many people in the industry who will feel both exposed and seen at the same time.”
It’s not a series just for industry insiders. It’s also for film buffs far and wide. The references are as varied as they are layered, from the mood of classic noirs like Chinatown to moviemaking tropes like the single-shot take. “It’s like a film bro’s wet dream,” she quips. “It’s very meta. There’s a fourth or fifth wall that stays up that allows you to enjoy it, so it’s like a double metaphor. But it’s great because you can enjoy it as any kind of viewer. My parents, who wouldn’t know every single reference, would still enjoy it, but the amount of knowledge you bring to it is your choice. It’s like a wink.”
Settling into one of the cracked vinyl booths at her go-to New York deli, we give our orders—a tuna salad sandwich for Sui Wonders and a tuna melt for me—to a waitress who jots them down on a pad of paper that appears to be as old as the establishment itself. Just as I bemoaned how long the line for a table can get on the weekends, she quickly informs me that the key to getting seated quickly is to come at the off times. A true regular. She sips on an iced coffee, her grown-out pixie cut tucked neatly behind her ears. She’s dressed comfy for a Monday afternoon in a pair of vintage pinstripe trousers, Isabel Marant wedge sneakers (yes, those 2011-era ones), and a Cartier Tank Française slung daintily on her left wrist.
Caffeinated and nourished, Sui Wonders begins recounting the whirlwind period she’s coming off of that sees the actress jetting between back-to-back film sets for the three major projects that are coming to screens this year: The Studio, the legacy sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex. “Right now, I’m like the SpongeBob meme where the world is spinning,” she laughs. This is a big year for the star, who admits that this is the longest stretch of continuous work she’s experienced in her career thus far. “I’ve been so lucky to be working pretty consistently for the past year. That’s never happened before,” she says. Just as quickly as she’s reacquainting herself with her routines at home in New York—including, importantly, a visit to this very lunch counter—she’s off again, boarding a flight the very next day to L.A., where she’s set to continue doing press for The Studio.
Sui Wonders burst onto the scene in the 2021 HBO Max teen drama Generation, where she played the confident cool girl Riley Luo. Little did anyone know then that she was living on her brother’s couch and weighing two polar-opposite life paths just three months prior to being cast in her breakout role. One: Pick up and move to Beijing to begin a corporate job that would appease her family. “This is probably what I should do,” she recounts of her mindset at the time. Or two: Relentlessly pursue a career in film. Thank goodness her brother gave her the nudge to keep auditioning. “Just try this for six more months, and if nothing happens, then you can pick a different path,” he insisted. “That was the crossroads for me,” she says. “Three months later, I got this part in Generation. That’s what changed it all. It gave me so much confidence.” Talk about kismet.
It was that tenacity that led her to booking the Max gig, and well, the rest is (mostly) history. Since then, it’s been a steady ascent up the Hollywood ladder with roles in 2021’s A24 slasher flick Bodies Bodies Bodies, the 2023 Apple TV+ series City on Fire, and Pete Davidson’s brainchild Bupkis. The Studio is only the beginning of a meteoric year for Sui Wonders. She leads the sequel to the 1997 cult horror I Know What You Did Last Summer that brings together an ensemble from various parts of the zeitgeist, such as Lola Tung, Madelyn Cline, and Nicholas Chavez, who are excitingly joined by some of the original cast. “It’s very daunting,” Sui Wonders admits of her first leading role in a major studio movie. “I have to fill the big shoes of Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze.” I already know there’s no question she’s up to the task. Her role is a sharp departure from bitey Quinn. “She’s a real all-American girl,” she notes.
She’ll do another 180 in the upcoming Araki-directed I Want Your Sex that also stars Olivia Wilde and Charli XCX. “Araki’s movies are crazy [in a good way],” she says. “He was the pioneer of queer cinema throughout the ’90s, and this one is very in line with that. You feel like you’re squirming in your seat.”
From crashing on her brother’s couch to leading an iconic film franchise, Sui Wonders’s path looks more like a vertical rise than a slow climb. “Each project I do feels like its own unique arrival,” she counters. “I’m grateful that it hasn’t felt like all of a sudden you’re a celebrity.”
Even her relationship with the term “celebrity” is very grounded. “That word doesn’t register,” she says. It’s not as if Sui Wonders is the kind of face that gets stopped in the street at every turn—instead, it’s more likely that people will stop her thinking they know her personally. Surely, she must be an old classmate or friend of a friend, they think. But that’s even more proof of Sui Wonders’s secret sauce. She possesses a certain instant familiarity that makes it seem as though you know her from a past life.
You see, unlike most young stars who have their minds laser-focused on the spotlight from day one, Sui Wonders didn’t fan the flames of her ambition at the earliest age. At home, her three siblings and the single mom who raised them were her “whole world.” Family and, well, hockey. Despite the glamour of her recent red carpet appearances, Sui Wonders was a huge tomboy growing up. She played for the boy’s team and was more comfortable in a sports jersey than she ever was in a dress. A dream to most 10-year-old girls, Sui Wonders tells me that picking out something to wear to one of Anna Sui’s runway shows (did I mention the designer is casually her aunt?) was more of an out-of-body experience than a “pinch me” moment for her. “I was a serious tomboy. I never took my hair out of a ponytail. Wearing a dress felt so alien to me,” she says. “I was like, ‘What do you mean I have to take off my Heelys and put on ballet flats?'”
Even though she’s swapped her hockey jerseys and Heelys for full Chanel looks and rare designer vintage these days, Sui Wonders is still sticking to her guns. It always has to feel like her, and more often than not, that means diving into the archives. “[Stylist] Thomas [Carter Phillips] and I talked about the reason why I wanted so much vintage, and it’s because of social media, which is an annoying thing to say, but it’s true. Everyone looks the same. It’s the world we live in. So any place where I can deviate and stick to my guts, yeah, I’m doing that,” she says.
Most of Sui Wonders’s wardrobe is vintage, and she tells me that she’s really gotten into silhouettes from the ’90s and early 2000s—”the cute parts of the early 2000s,” to be exact. Her archival sensibilities are already beginning to define the Chase Sui Wonders aesthetic. She recently posed for Marie Claire in a Prada spring 1997 dress cut from the same print that Gwyneth Paltrow famously wore to a premiere with Brad Pitt that year. For The Studio‘s South by Southwest premiere, she picked out an Anna Sui corseted skirt set from the early aughts. “She’s very protective,” Sui Wonders says of her aunt’s personal collection. “This is kind of the first time I’ve gotten a key to the castle, and I am loving it here.” She tells me that Carter Phillips and her have been on a treasure hunt to curate the looks for this press tour, diving deep into the archives. The indie singer-songwriter Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star and early aughts style icon Devon Aoki are both fixtures on her mood board.
When I ask if any of this is strategic to position her in a certain light, she shrugs. “Even if it’s a designer that nobody knows about, I’d rather be wearing something cool that makes me feel like myself rather than something that’s strategic,” she says.
If there’s one thing I learned from my lunch date with Sui Wonders, it’s that she knows exactly what she wants—out of her wardrobe, out of her career, and, yes, even for lunch.
Get the Look
Chanel
Clip-On Stud Earrings
Chanel
Chance Eau Splendide
Chanel
Première Ribbon Watch
Photographer: Daria Kobayashi Ritch
Stylist: Lauren Eggertsen
Hairstylist: Eddie Cook
Makeup Artist: Kara Yoshimoto Bua
Manicurist: Betina Goldstein
DP: Kyle Hartman
Special thanks to Santa Monica Pier Corporation
(Image credit: Future)
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