Growing up, Chase Sui Wonders wouldn’t be caught dead at a slasher movie. “I always stayed far away. If I was watching that with my friends at a sleepover, I would have to go home, and it would be very embarrassing,” she says.
In 2022, she starred in the horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies—and something changed. “I saw how the sausage was made, and suddenly I was no longer afraid of horror movies. Now I can watch them all the time.”
Which is a good thing, because the actor is starring in another one out July 18. In I Know What You Did Last Summer, a reboot of the ’90s classic, a new group of friends is terrorized by a stalker after they cover up a deadly accident. Though Sui Wonders was too much of a scaredy-cat to grow up with the 1997 original, she did worship its stars: She watched Jennifer Love Hewitt’s 2001 crime comedy Heartbreakers over and over, and 2002’s Scooby-Doo, starring Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Gellar, is “one of the most scratched-up DVDs in my basement at home,” she says.
Hewitt and Prinze reprise their roles in the new sequel, making Sui Wonders’s teenage dreams come true. “They were so welcoming. They were so willing to hang,” she says. So was Prinze’s wife, Gellar, whose character was memorably slaughtered in the first film. The Buffy star also came to the shoot and “shared so many kernels of wisdom about the industry, about life, about love. Gave me boy advice.”
Sui Wonders has been surrounded by her idols a lot lately. She plays ambitious newbie studio executive Quinn Hackett in Apple TV+’s hit comedy series The Studio, a part she nabbed after auditioning for Seth Rogen—who startled Sui Wonders by asking her to improvise in their first meeting. “In that moment, my heart sank into my gut,” she says. “It went on for what felt like 10 minutes, and then he lit up a joint and said ‘Great work.’ I thought that was either the worst sign ever, or I got the part.”
The role allowed her to perform wild comedy opposite veterans like Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Hahn, and Catherine O’Hara, along with Rogen. It was a new experience, and one that has her craving more. “The Studio and Quinn has helped me unlock a part of myself that is kind of just unabashed,” she says. “I just want to play complicated characters—interesting women who are one degree off, women who are just unafraid to be crazy or weird or ugly.”
Sui Wonders, a self-proclaimed tomboy who “wore the same thing every day and played ice hockey” as a kid, says she didn’t have any friends in elementary school. But that didn’t bother her because she was best friends with her three siblings. Growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, they’d watch movies, do impressions of their favorite characters, and make their own films. (Creativity runs in the family: Her aunt is the designer Anna Sui.) By the time she was in high school, they were writing scripts and casting neighbors in feature-length movies. But she didn’t plan to pursue filmmaking or acting when she was accepted to Harvard. “I don’t think I ever thought that it would be a realistic career option,” she says. “My plan was to study astrophysics. I was like, ‘This is what people go to Harvard to do.’”
That changed after she met other students whose parents worked in the industry. “I just needed to pivot away from astrophysics—I was failing,” she says. She majored in film studies and production, wrote for The Harvard Lampoon, made a few short films, and got an agent, thanks to help from a friend working in the agency’s mail room. Even then, Sui Wonders wasn’t sure she’d make it. “I was seriously flirting with this idea that I would just say goodbye to it all and just become a corporate drone in Beijing,” she says.
Then she wrote another script and booked a role on the HBO Max show Generation—a graphic series about high schoolers exploring sexuality and identity. While filming that, she landed the role in Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, a breakout horror comedy hit with a cast that included rising stars Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, and Rachel Sennott. “I’m very much a believer in momentum. There’s just an extra layer of confidence you have when you’re already on a film set that can propel you to the next job,” she says.
In Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Sui Wonders played Emma, an actor brought to a “hurricane party” by her boyfriend, played by Pete Davidson. Life started to imitate art when Sui Wonders began dating Davidson—and had her first run-ins with paparazzi. They reportedly broke up less than a year later, but the experience was a big lesson for Sui Wonders about the uglier aspects of Hollywood. “I learned early on in my career how nasty that side of the business is, and I learned a lot of stuff that I don’t want and I want to try to avoid,” she says. “Hollywood can play a lot of tricks on you. It’s so seductive with events and the flashing lights and the people calling your name. It’s very easy to get swept up in that.”
Sui Wonders hasn’t always felt like Hollywood was bursting with opportunities for people of mixed ethnicity like her (she’s half Asian). Early on, when she’d read scripts, it never felt like the role was a fit. “I had all the shame around it. I would try so hard and I would put myself on tape, but it never felt quite right,” she says. “It always felt like it was written for a white girl, or it was written for a full Chinese girl, or a Japanese girl who has to play a geisha during World War II or something.”
But her latest opportunities have made her realize things are changing. She says the part in The Studio wasn’t originally written for a biracial actor, but once she was cast, they added a running joke in which white executives keep asking her what’s acceptable when it comes to diverse casting choices. She was interested in I Know What You Did Last Summer largely because she would be playing the all-American girl in a classic all-American movie. “You just don’t see that many people who look like me who are playing these kind of leading ingenue roles,” she says. “It felt exciting to step into that and also give her some unique flair.”
Being in original stories from boundary-pushing creators has made her optimistic for the future—and her next chapter. “The thing that I originally felt very complicated about has now become sort of my superpower,” she says. Now living in New York, she’ll continue to take big swings. We’ll see her do that in I Want Your Sex, a psychosexual thriller starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman, a movie where she plays “an absolute freak.”
And though her acting career has taken off, Sui Wonders still has plans to write and direct. In 2022, she made and costarred in a short film called Wake; she hopes to collaborate soon with her sister, who is also a filmmaker. The possibilities now seem endless. “It feels like the world has opened up to me as I’ve opened up to myself.”
HAIR, JUNYA NAKASHIMA; MAKEUP, MAKI RYOKE; MANICURE, ELINA OGAWA; TAILOR, JEN HEBNER; SET DESIGN, COLIN PHELAN. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY PREISS CREATIVE. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.
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