Dress RABANNE Bra and brief STYLIST’S OWN
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With leading roles in The Studio and I Know What You Did Last Summer, the actor proves she’s one to watch.
PHOTOGRAPHY Luisa Opalesky
STYLED BY Thomas Carter Phillips
BY Samantha Simon
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From the moment you meet her, Chase Sui Wonders gives good energy. The actor, 29, walks into the lobby of The Marlton Hotel in New York City, saying hello with a warm hug as she settles into our cozy booth. Wearing a white tank, off-white denim shorts, and a chunky striped knit—tied diagonally across her chest, in a way that only someone deeply cool can pull off—her attention immediately turns to the well-behaved dog sitting at a nearby table. “Did he do the thing where he puts his whole belly on the carpet?” she asks, prompting a serious discussion of the pose’s technical term (it’s a sploot). After pausing a beat to order an Arnold Palmer, she waxes poetic about her own dream pup, a Brussels Griffon. “I want one so badly,” she says. “I feel like it would be a nice anchor for the very chaotic lifestyle that I lead.”
Chaotic is an understatement, as Sui Wonders has recently been the very definition of booked and busy. Known for her roles in TV dramedies like Generation and Bupkis, as well as the A24 horror flick Bodies Bodies Bodies, this month she takes the lead in Sony Pictures I Know What You Did Last Summer, a sequel to the 1997 slasher starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. Hitting theaters on July 18, it’ll mark the latest chapter in a career-defining 2025 for Sui Wonders, who’s fresh off a critically acclaimed part in The Studio, Seth Rogen’s satirical take on Hollywood that premiered on AppleTV+ in March. “It’s a total skewering of the industry, but also a love letter,” says Sui Wonders, who plays junior executive Quinn Hackett at the fictional Continental Studios. “And really, that’s why we’re all still here. We love it and hate it.”
Creating films that prioritize Art, capital A, rather than IP-driven commercial success, is a key theme explored in The Studio. Sui Wonders’s character, whom she proudly describes as “savage and opportunistic,” is focused on Art; to prove it, she pushes to hire indie directors of A24 fame, even when a colleague derisively describes the studio’s films as being for “pansexual mixologists living in Bed-Stuy.”
“I’ve gotten texts from friends who work [at A24] being like, A lot of digs at A24 on the show this week, Chase!” she says, laughing. “I think there’s room for both the big studios championing blockbusters and the A24 execs championing cool directors, but neither is spared from the criticism of being pretentious or cash-grabbing. Plus, the best people in this industry can make fun of themselves.” (As proof: Everyone from Charlize Theron to Johnny Knoxville appears as exaggerated versions of themselves.)
With a degree in film production from Harvard, as well as experience writing and directing her own short films, Sui Wonders was thrilled to talk shop with director Ron Howard when he guest-starred on The Studio; she was also so excited for Martin Scorsese’s appearance that she “pretended to have business” on set that day, despite being off. “That was surreal,” she says. “He was such a team player, and to remain curious about someone else’s set when you’re that much of a legend…it was the opposite of a ‘don’t meet your heroes’ moment.”
Surrounded by her idols—in addition to Rogen, Hollywood power players Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Hahn, and Catherine O’Hara round out the show’s cast—the pressure was, understandably, on. “I felt like I had a lot to prove, just because I am the question mark,” she says. “[Cocreator] Evan Goldberg always said to me, You were the wild card. And I’m like, I hope I delivered! He’d just laugh, and I’d be like, Was that a yes? Hello?”
To get in the battle-ready headspace of her character, Sui Wonders read Machiavelli’s The Prince before filming. “Being a total gunslinger can help you get your foot in the door in this crazy business,” she says. “It’s cool to embody that kind of stoicism as a woman, because that’s typically a man’s role. I find that it’s nice to channel that feeling when walking into a precarious situation, but I also like to connect to my feminine energy. I’m not a stone wall. In fact, I probably need to work a little harder on letting my walls down.”
“I’m not a stone wall. In fact, I probably need to work a little harder on letting my walls down.”
A decidedly un-Hollywood sentiment, although it’s clear that Sui Wonders has no plans to identify as a celebrity. Or, for that matter, to subscribe to the hype of it all. “I think the aura surrounding celebrities is so weird,” she says. “There’s a zombie brain that happens in this fabricated reality of Hollywood; it’s like this strange forcefield of people acting crazy and not being themselves. And it morphs the way that celebrities not only behave, but also how people respond to them.”
Sui Wonders attributes her own down-to-earth sensibility to a core group of “buddies” from high school and college, as well as her upbringing in a Michigan suburb. “I had the best childhood ever, but some would call it rigorous,” she says. “My parents are very goal-oriented and no-nonsense; my mom is Catholic, from the Midwest, and my dad grew up in Detroit with intense Asian parents. They were always propping me up, but they just wanted [my siblings and me] to surpass what they did in their careers.’
A go-getter by nature, from a young age Sui Wonders was inspired by the path of her aunt, fashion designer Anna Sui. “It was very cool to have a woman in my family who not only left the cultural desert of Detroit to pursue a creative career, but did well at it,” she says. A tomboy who didn’t fully appreciate her aunt’s fashion shows back then, she’s now making up for lost time. “I’m obsessed with her clothes, and she’s let me wear some pieces from her archive on red carpets.”
“There’s a zombie brain that happens in this fabricated reality of Hollywood; it’s like this strange forcefield of people acting crazy and not being themselves.”
Her experience with fame has, largely, been positive. “People approach me to talk about my characters, not to get a selfie,” she says. Although her personal life briefly became tabloid fodder amid a 2023 romance with Bodies Bodies Bodies and Bupkis co-star Pete Davidson, Sui Wonders remains unfazed. “Thankfully, I’ve kept things pretty separate,” she explains. “I like to share work updates, but I’m not necessarily interested in divulging my deepest, darkest secrets to the world. I’ve also been single for a minute, so it’s not really entering the chat for me.”
For now, Sui Wonders is focused on her romantic entanglements onscreen. She was “obsessed” with her one and only sex scene in The Studio, which finds Quinn too distracted by work to concentrate on her boyfriend’s efforts in the bedroom. “Seeing sex onscreen can be really gratuitous, and at that point, you can just watch porn,” she says. “I was so excited to do a sex scene where the goal was not for it to be hot at all. It’s the least insecure I’ve ever felt while filming one of those; I didn’t give a rat’s ass. I wanted to make it gross and weird, just to play it for laughs and the tragedy of the fact that she couldn’t let herself enjoy sex.”
That portrayal couldn’t be more different from another of Sui Wonders’s upcoming projects, Gregg Araki’s erotic thriller I Want Your Sex, co-starring Olivia Wilde, Charli XCX, and Cooper Hoffman. While details have remained largely under wraps, “it’s overtly sexy,” she promises. “We all get down and dirty; there’s sweat and tears and maybe a little bit of blood. I hope it will shock people…and maybe leave them aroused.” Still, it’s the story—”imbued with deep character study and psychology”—that was the real draw. “I’ll do a sex scene like that any day of the week,” she says. “If it’s just about how hot people look, that’s not interesting to me.”
For her own entertainment, top picks range from “the esoteric Japanese cinema” to the type of box-office hit that would stir up heated discourse on The Studio. “I grew up loving blockbusters,” she says. “The Die Hard franchise was my bread and butter.” It was a dream come true when she was cast to lead I Know What You Did Last Summer alongside Madelyn Cline, Sarah Pidgeon, and Jonah Haur-King.
“It’s a continuation of this iconic story, and it’s fun and campy and smart,” she says. “I play an all-American girl who has a really strong moral code, and although she is very damaged and has some demons, she’s the glue of her friend group. I’m just grateful that [director] Jen [Jennifer Kaytin Robinson] took a chance on me, because I didn’t see girls like me leading those kinds of movies growing up. And it’s not like I have 20 million Instagram followers, either.”
She does, however, have two new phone numbers: Those of Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr., both of whom returned to film the sequel in Australia. “They text me to ask about life, and it’s just wild that I get to call them friends,” says Sui Wonders. “I predict they’re going to have a bit of a renaissance after this, because they’re amazing. And in the slasher genre, the stakes are higher when you really care about the characters.”
A popcorn movie through and through, it provides “such good escapism,” says Sui Wonders. “It doesn’t have any kind of didactic parable about the world today; you get to just laugh and scream and gasp. My 17th birthday would have been at this movie—it’s the kind of thing where you’d be holding a boy’s clammy hand for the first time and might kiss him during one of the slower parts, all while borrowing his hoodie.”
When it comes to future roles, Sui Wonders plans to keep audiences guessing. “I’d like to continue playing very offbeat women that you don’t usually see on camera—Gena Rowlands [the late actress known for her dramatic collaborations with director John Cassavetes in the films A Woman Under the Influence and Gloria] is always the goalpost,” she says. “I love situations in which I feel uncomfortable, because I think that valley of discomfort is where you get your best stuff.”
Ultimately, her own measure of success will be defined by her happiness. “The most successful people could be dead inside, and that, to me, is a very unsuccessful person,” she says. “I’m just going to keep trying to be happy, more often than not. And, at the end of the day, I do think I’d have enough self-awareness to know if I was really failing.” She laughs. “Or, at least I hope.”
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by Samantha Simon
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HAIR: Blake Erik FORWARD ARTISTS
MAKEUP: Rommy Najor FORWARD ARTISTS
CREATIVE CONSULTANT: Mariana Suplicy
PRODUCED BY: Danielle Ellsworth
STYLING ASSISTANT: Morgan Lip
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