Spoilers for season four, episode six of AppleTV’s The Morning Show ahead.
Just as some of Hollywood’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts have rung hollow during Trump 2.0, in the aftermath of the industry’s dual acting and writing strikes, the issue of AI has become an increasingly hot topic. “Coming into The Morning Show this season, I had a much more binary good-versus-bad vision of AI,” says Greta Lee, who has starred as media executive Stella Bak since joining the show in its second season, “and it’s just so much more complicated than that.”
While researching what would become of her character’s ultimate downfall—and some of the tech in her new movie, Tron: Ares—Lee met with professors at Caltech, as well as Dr. Fei-Fei Li, who is considered the “godmother of AI” for her creation of the online ImageNet database, which collects large-scale data for training AI algorithms. “I found the women behind all of this tech so much more interesting [than the machinery itself],” says Lee. “This idea of human-centric AI—being really clear about putting in guardrails and asking questions repeatedly: Who’s benefiting from this? In what way? How can it serve the greater good? Then, of course, you see the pitfalls of this tech unchecked. It’s an entirely clumsy piece of machinery currently. It is not to be trusted.”
The same goes for Tilly Norwood, the first AI “actor” who royally pissed off Hollywood with her public introduction to the industry last month. “Oh, God,” Lee sighs when I bring up the computer-programmed thespian whose creator, Eline Van der Velden, founder of AI production company Particle6, has pitched as a sort of successor to Scarlett Johansson. “I’m not going to be shy about my disapproval about that. I’m all for innovation and advancement, but I do think we have to be really careful. It’s a kind of fun party trick, but I would hate to see that evolving into something more. The ethos of what I do in movies and TV is connecting people. This is about the human experience, as cheesy as it sounds. So if we wake up one day and we have removed the human element to all of this, it’s dead. We can use [AI] to facilitate, to boost and enhance certain aspects of it, but at the core, we need people.”
As Lee sees it, AI and DEI are “intrinsically linked,” and many of the women she met with “are working to ensure that AI itself is not racist and skewed,” adding one more word of caution for good measure. “I don’t think that it’s possible for anyone to sit back and just hope that all of these technological advancements will be equitable,” says Lee. “That does require human intervention.”
All of these real-world parallels loom over Lee’s final moments on The Morning Show, known for its eerily resonant but outlandishly twisty plotlines, such as sending anchors to literal space or reenacting the January 6 insurrection. The fourth season bids farewell to Lee in a similarly dramatic fashion as her network CEO character Stella prepares for a do-or-die presentation during tense talent negotiations with Nicole Beharie’s anchor, Chris Hunter.
Offscreen, Lee was feeling a pressure not dissimilar to Stella’s. “It only happens with The Morning Show, but when I’m wrapped, I break out into hives,” she tells Vanity Fair during a recent Zoom. “There is something psychological about carrying the weight of her dreams and everything she wants—not just for her company, but for the world. What a heavy burden that can be, and how tragic it can feel when you find yourself in a world that can’t support your vision.” Lee says with a shrug: “Living with her for so long, I can’t help but feel a bit of that.”
For 42-year-old Lee, a Korean American actor who made her mark on female-led series like Russian Doll and Girls before her star turn in A24’s Past Lives (2023), the decision to leave the longest role of her career wasn’t taken lightly. “This is like family to me. We’ve been together through so much, through COVID, the various shutdowns. I’ve had my two kids [with husband, writer-producer Russ Armstrong] during all of this,” says Lee. “So leaving is totally bittersweet.”
But with a Vogue cover, as well as roles in big-screen features including Kathryn Bigelow’s new thriller A House of Dynamite and Tron: Ares—the third installment in a sci-fi Disney franchise that dates back to 1982—Lee’s dance card is full. “In a dream world, I would be able to clone myself and continue on forever. I do believe that sometimes certain stories have a natural end,” she says.
On The Morning Show, with the UBA-NBN merger of last season complete, Stella hopes to harness her power as CEO to do things differently than her predecessor Cory (Billy Crudup), like embracing new AI technology and diversifying storytelling across network brass. But internally, Stella is struggling—both with the limitations of her role and a secret affair with Miles (Aaron Pierre), husband of her boss, UBN board president Celine Dumont (Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard). “Stella matches my own disbelief at where we find ourselves just a few years from when she started. How do we reconcile all of our hopes and dreams from just a few years ago?” Lee asks. “Feeling it was a just cause to be a righteous warrior on behalf of these beliefs and then finding ourselves at a loss.”
Stella’s crisis of conscience reaches its boiling point during a high-stakes presentation of said AI technology that goes off the rails, with the chatbot disclosing personal—and very damaging—information about Stella, leading her to resign from UBN. In voiceover, Stella maligns her descent from “smart, hardworking, steady” to “someone who does the job without expecting credit, who will shrink herself when asked, who won’t cause any trouble” at the helm. “Be who they want you to be until you can’t,” she says.
Says Lee, “The network broke her, but in all fairness, she’s not a victim. She’s someone who entered this position, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, full of ambition and drive. She was reimagining what the news could be. But the world was not moving in the same direction. I mean, here we are now, it’s 2025 and DEI is considered, like, a slur.”
Following her network fall from grace, Stella passes the baton to her trusted former colleague Mia (Karen Pittman), who managed to rise in the corporate ranks without getting consumed by the pressure to conform. “We ugly cried our way through that scene for hours. We have so much love for each other,” says Lee, growing visibly emotional. “Karen and I are both mothers. Both women of color. We have had to navigate certain spoken and unspoken challenges within the world, and there’s so much that is unsaid between Stella and Mia in every moment that is completely understood without it being articulated. I still get teary when I think about that.”
After the AI incident, Stella and Miles decide to run away together to Italy, but he stands her up at the airport after Celine gives him an ultimatum. But Lee has higher hopes for her character. “I want her to be on a beach having a nice, tall tiki drink. Maybe I’m projecting something,” she admits, smiling. Still, “The ultimate liberation is to fail and to be unburdened by the weight of carrying the torch.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
What Bari Weiss Means for 60 Minutes
-
All About Melania
-
Meet the British ’90s It Girl Who Wants to Make England Great Again
-
Anjelica Huston’s Cultured Coolness
-
Gore Vidal’s Final Feud
-
The 6 Grisly Films Inspired by Serial Killer Ed Gein
-
Charlie Kirk, Redeemed by the Media
-
The 25 Best Movies to Watch on Netflix This October
-
From the Archive: The Hollywood Secret Katharine Hepburn Helped Bury
The post The Morning Show’s Greta Lee Reckons With a New Hollywood, Where DEI Is a “Slur” and AI “Is Not to Be Trusted” appeared first on Vanity Fair.
