When I meet Havana Rose Liu in late April at a café in London’s Primrose Hill, she muses over the menu before ordering both a berry smoothie and an iced americano. Her whole life, the actor quickly explains, she has experienced debilitating indecisiveness that she approaches by avoiding choices altogether. “I always double up,” she says. “I can’t decide, so I just get two.” 

Despite the indecision, Liu, 28, has reached a decisive point in her career. Since her debut with Karen Cinorre’s May Day at Sundance in 2021, she has become one of acting’s most arresting new talents, with a résumé that straddles both commercial and indie hits, and a range that alternates between feral and girl-next-door. After a lead role in 2022’s thriller No Exit, Liu’s breakout came in 2023 with Emma Seligman’s beloved Bottoms, a comedy about teenage lesbians who start a fight club at high school. Starring Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri and Kaia Gerber, the film helped to hard-launch Liu and her costars. “It was a beautiful thing to be part of,” she reflects. “We all jumped on the trampoline and then shot off into space.” 

The view is pretty good. Armed with beverages, we walk to the top of Primrose Hill, which is fully flushed with sun and late afternoon revellers. Liu—green eyes sparkling and her mini Balenciaga bag hooked around her arm—listens attentively as I begin, perhaps due to her easy presence, to tell her about the ancient ley lines under our feet and different landmarks along the skyline, from the BT Tower to the Tower of London. “What can’t you see from up here?” she gasps with comedic effect, as we break into laughter. 

A New Yorker, Liu has been between London, for rehearsals on Alex Garland’s Elden Ring, an A24 live action remake of the 2022 fantasy video game, and Budapest, where she has been shooting Arkasha Stevenson’s new horror film alongside Josh Hutcherson, Hunter Schafer and Emma Corrin. “I’ve been shooting this whole project and then rehearsing another one,” says Liu. “It’s funny to have your foot in three different worlds—you’re holding on to yourself and two different characters at once. It’s an interesting juggling game.” 

Liu doesn’t mind getting lost in a role. “It’s kind of the magic of it,” she says, as we take a seat on the grass, her drinks remaining virtually untouched. She also has a habit of turning the question back on me—with genuine curiosity rather than as deflection. Liu prefers the projects where she feels like everyone else is fully in; a sensation she first felt with May Day. “Everybody just truly gave their body to the thing. With an indie, everybody has to be 100% there and caring about it in a very particular way,” she says. “A lot of this has felt like undoing who I was before and then regrouping with everything that I’ve now just learned in some way.” 

The demands of her role in Daniel Roher’s upcoming film Tuner were particularly acute. Liu plays a pianist and love interest to Leo Woodall’s Niki, a piano turner with a hearing condition that leads him into a criminal underworld when he learns he can break into safes. “What is the opposite of a low lift?” asks Liu, who spent three months learning to play the piano for the part and delivers masterful performances in the film’s emotional crescendos. “I hadn’t played piano since I was young. It was a crazy feeling: so many hours of practice a day, feeling like my hands were going to fall off,” she says. “I wanted to use my double as little as possible. I just had some stick up my ass and wanted to do it all myself. [In the final cut], I can see my double’s hands a couple of times. But it didn’t feel like the right thing to have a goal that wasn’t to do it all.”

Performance has always been a part of Liu’s life. As a child, she practised ballet and contemporary as well as Chinese dance (Liu is half-Chinese on her father’s side), whilst as a high school student and as an undergraduate at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualised Study, she studied performance art, creating projects that explored fetishization of Asian Americans and co-dependency, inspired by Marina Abramovic and Tehching Hsieh. “I fell in love with all the strange ways that it could comment on reality. It itched my brain in a nice way.” 

Dance still informs Liu creatively. “I love looking at acting through the perspective of dance,” she explains. The shoot that accompanies this interview was inspired by Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, which Liu describes as a “dream project”, whilst she mentions a formative recent viewing of Wim Wenders’ 1990 documentary about Pina Bausch. “Dance informs so much of how I look at life in general. I’m always looking at little things through the lens of choreography,” says Liu. “People passing each other in the street is so romantic to me. So in acting it naturally plays into how I look at character.” 

Whilst a student at NYU, Liu was streetcast by an agency that led her to commercial and modelling work, including a Vogue Italia cover in September 2020. The agency also cast for short films. “That’s when I was like, this part is more fun. It pays less, but it’s cool to do these strange short films in random places.” These parts led Liu to the talent agency ICM offering her representation. “I remember going into the meeting like, I don’t even know if I want to do this.” But perhaps falling into it suited her indecision?  “I think that’s the thing, if I had really been dreaming about it, I would have overthought myself out of doing it. But because it happened under my nose, it was a beautiful thing.”

Liu grew up in Brooklyn and her parents, who founded a wedding planning company called The Knot, met at film school. Her mother initially pursued acting, too. When Liu went down the same path, her parent’s initial resistance was followed with wholehearted acceptance. “It became like, well, you really are our child,” she says.

As someone who didn’t set out to act, Liu describes often feeling on the back foot: “Most of the time, the references people throw out, I have no idea what they’re talking about. But I just write a list of everything people say. It’s amazing to see these things for the first time, my world is expanding.” Acting on stage—in the 2025 off-Broadway production of All Nighter, a play about a group of girlfriends in their final week of college—was key to ridding herself of imposter syndrome. “I thought to myself, I can’t really be an actor if I’ve never acted on stage,” says Liu. “[Theatre] is so communal in a way that I really love. You feel like you’re just keeping a ball in the air and making sure that if someone drops it, you’re going to pick it up too.” 

With Bottoms, Liu also allowed herself to be held by the queer community, speaking publicly about her sexuality around the time of the film’s release. Her character, Isabel, a “manic sort of wifey demonic heart throb” is subversive in that she is less conventionally queer. “We were playing with archetypes in that film, I watched so many episodes of The Bachelor, I wanted to look at what an American high school hot girl would be like in the world.” 

After Bottoms, Liu and her castmates received celebrity status—particularly in her native Brooklyn. “I think it’s the place where I get recognized most in the world,” she says. “It’s like queer American holy ground, and Bottoms was basically grassroots held by the queer community.” In London, Liu has been enjoying more anonymity. “Now people just look at me and go, how the fuck do I know your face?,” says Liu. “I get asked if we went to high school together a lot.” 

Some of Liu’s most significant roles have also been her smallest. She starred in a 2024 Bleu de Chanel fragrance campaign as Timothée Chalamet’s ‘mystery girl’. It was directed by Martin Scorsese: “I thought, I just could be told what to do by you in my life. I was like somebody hit me in the face. The pinching is not doing anything.” In 2025, she had a fleeting appearance in a music video for ‘Madwoman’ by Icelandic-Chinese popstar Laufey with a cast of other prominent White-Asian such as Hudson Williams and Lola Tung. “I freaking love these people,” says Liu.   

Havana, who has Irish, English and French heritage on her mother’s side, has been using her time in London to connect with her European roots. A family trip to Ireland planned this summer for her little brother. “It’s a family tradition to visit the place we are named after when we turn 18.” (Havana herself is named after the Cuban bar where her parents had their first date). A recent trip to Wales revealed further layers of identity. “My mom said by the way, your aunt said one of our first ancestors who moved [to America] was Welsh,” says Liu, and we discuss the mysticism of the landscape. “You’re in the wind and you’re like, that’s dragon’s breath.” 

A frisbee hurtles our way, landing peacefully on the grass. “I wish I could be a frisbeer,” says Liu, with genuine feeling. “I’m so bad at it though.” She tells me she was captain of her high school volleyball team, a position she believes she earned through team spirit rather than talent. “I’m good at movement, but something moves towards me and I get so scared,” she notes. “I need to work on catching the goddam ball”. 

An infinite number of possibilities are within Liu’s grasp. She will soon depart for Cannes for the premiere of Nicolas Wending Refn’s futuristic horror-thriller Her Private Hell—whose details are still shrouded in mist. “I think Nick is fascinating as a director, and I thought that this script was chewing on some very fascinating and complex material,” offers Liu, who is herself yet to see the film. “I’m feeling excited but intimidated,” she says of the premiere. I am flattered when she asks if I have any tips. I mention the festival’s fetish for long applauses. “Practice clapping? Oh my god.” 

Liu—who doesn’t rule out writing and directing—describes dream roles as a film about a sign language interpreter and a dancer who fall in love. She would also love to star in a silent film, as well as playing a ‘foley’, or the person who makes the sounds in the film. I point out the irony, the film without noise, and the film about the person who makes the noise. An iced coffee and a smoothie, if you will. “I like to swing to polar opposites, film to film.” 

As we walk back down the hill, Liu notes that the intensity of life is starting to catch up with her. “Today, I got hit by bone tiredness. It’s a lot of travelling, bouncing back and forth. I’m like a well-worn towel,” she says. Yet she remains upbeat. “But in a beautiful way, like the tiredness after you’ve climbed a big mountain.” Liu has plans to see friends in London tonight, but insists—as our interview has overrun—that she must walk me to my friend who is waiting nearby—to show that it is her fault I am late. She walks off into the evening, two drinks still in hand, looking pretty sure of where she is going next.