Lucy Liu and Callina Liang on Ghosts, Skin Care, and Working With Steven Soderbergh on Presence

Presence, the latest film from Steven Soderbergh, is a haunted-house story told from the point of view of the ghost—and set in the new suburban home of Chris, Rebekah, and teenagers Chloe and Tyler, played by Chris Sullivan, Lucy Liu, Callina Liang, and Eddie Maday, respectively. (Pulling double duty as the camera operator, Soderbergh renders the film’s images with distorted fishbowl angles and juddering movements, underscoring their subjectivity.)

Yet Presence is more a domestic drama than a tale of paranormal activity. From the ghost’s perspective, we see the characters’ lives fractured by grief: While Chloe struggles with the death of her two friends, Rebekah coldly favors Tyler, Tyler mostly ignores Chloe, and Chris tries to help everyone. The already-tense atmosphere only intensifies once the presence begins to fixate on Chloe.

Shot in under two weeks, with little to no rehearsal time, the film thrives on the strength of its cast—particularly Liang, who gives a tremendous performance as the emotionally bereft Chloe.

“There’s something very corrosive about what’s happening within this family,” says Liu. “Corrosion is not something that you necessarily see. It’s something you see after the fact. There’s only so much that a person can hold before everything collapses.”

With Presence now in theaters, Vogue spoke to Liu and Liang about preparing for their unconventional film—and their own relationships to the paranormal.

Vogue:  When you first read the script, what was your reaction to its conceit—the story being told from the ghost’s perspective?

Callina Liang: I have never read anything like it. I had to go back and reread it, and then read it again, to fully be able to imagine what it was going to look like. Even then, I didn’t know what to expect until we started filming. It was a huge surprise when I saw the whole thing. Steven just really made it come to life, bit by bit.

I’ve read that Steven sometimes uses an actor’s personal history to inform and recalibrate a role. I’m curious if the character Chloe evolved after you were cast?

Liang: That’s interesting, because I think Chloe was pretty similar on the page [to] when I was cast and actually filming it. But maybe that’s related to me having a few similarities with the character herself.

What were some of those commonalities? I know that in the TV series Tell Me Everything, you also play a character around the same age as Chloe, but she seems very different.

Liang: Totally. Chloe is very obviously a lost teenage girl who has never felt settled in any of her homes. I relate to that feeling because I moved around a lot growing up. I’ve also experienced some paranormal activity in my life a couple of times, but the most prominent one was when I was in drama school in New York. The dorm I lived in was a former senior home converted into student housing. I wouldn’t say it was haunted, but there was definitely a spirit. I would wake up from naps to writing on the wall, phones would be taken out of their chargers…stuff like that. At first I was really scared, but I learned how to coexist with the spirit, which was interesting because Chloe was never afraid of the presence either, [unlike] the other characters in the film.

Lucy, do you believe in ghosts? What’s your relationship to the paranormal?

Lucy Liu: For me, the paranormal is kind of normal because it’s about souls. We are all souls that exist in these corporeal bodies. Even when our bodies are no longer able to hold us, those souls still exist, and they need to go somewhere else. Sometimes, not unlike in Presence, they may not have found a home, or they’re not willing to leave so they stick around. People get a feeling when they walk into a space that they say is haunted, but it‘s really because of [what I’ve just said].

Your characters’ relationship is quite fraught. I read that Steven was inspired by living in a house in LA where previously a girl murdered her mother. That made me think about Rebekah ahd Chloe’s’ dynamic differently. How would you describe it?

Liu: The relationship between Rebekah and Chloe is complicated. I think Chloe is open to receiving love from her mother, but she never really has because Rebekah’s poured all of her hopes and dreams into her son. There’s such clear favoritism, and it’s strange. I don’t want to call it disinterest. It almost feels like a casual abandonment of her daughter…who is actually there. It’s fascinating to know that Rebekah doesn’t realize how unkind and damaging it is to be emotionally dislocated from her daughter like that, especially when she’s lost two of her friends.

Lucy, I know that you have a son. Did you draw on anything from your personal life for your portrayal of a “boy mom”?

Liu: It’s funny—I didn’t, because [Tyler] was in a very different age range. I just worked off of [David Koepp’s] script because it was all there. It was hard because she’s not necessarily a character that is really easy to understand; there’s a lot of mystery and smoke. There are a lot of secrets, and I love that David doesn’t reveal them, even at the end. You never find out what happened with her work, with her husband, with the lawyer. In some ways, that backstory is a little bit of a MacGuffin. Everything shifts into something much more intangible—emotions of grief and loss and what that does to a person. It opens her up and creates this huge cavern for something else, something that’s not about getting ahead in her work life or her son’s life.

It’s usually only in films specifically about the Asian American experience that you see an Asian American family. I’m curious if it felt liberating, in some way, to focus purely on the dynamic of a mother and daughter and the themes of the movie without racial identity being a focus.

Liang: A hundred percent. The entire time you were asking that question, I thought, Absolutely. It was very freeing for me to, just once, be cast in something that had nothing [to do with] race. It was nothing about what I looked like, but it was just, simply, you are this person, you’re in a house, you’re experiencing ghost stuff, you’re struggling with your family. Like, just be a girl. Obviously, in the industry, a lot of progress has already been made, but there’s a lot of progress [still] to be made. A lot of tokenism and things like that still happen.

Liu: It’s such a long road. There’s this constant feeling that they’re including somebody for diversity’s sake, like picking one person from each [race or ethnicity] and throwing them in there, or there’s only one role that can be diverse. God forbid, there’s more than one role! It didn’t cross my mind at first because I think Steven was really the focal point, calling me to this whole project. But now that you mention it, I’m seeing, of course, it was such a relief to not have to think about that. It’s not a highlight—it’s just a given.

Carmen Cuba, the casting director, always has such an interesting eye. She works with Steven quite a bit, and I have to believe there’s a lot of influence between them. Projects like this will create more opportunities where cultural identity isn’t necessarily the focal point.

Callina, what was it like working with Lucy on set? I assume she wasn’t method acting and only talking to Eddie?

Liang: [Laughs.] Outside of character, Lucy didn’t favor anyone. It all felt like one big family having fun, which was important because, on camera, we were dealing with such heavy material. It all felt very intricate, and the emotions came very naturally. We didn’t try to push anything. We just learned how to coexist in a room together.

How did Steven prep you? Did the way he filmed affect how you acted?

Liu: What’s wonderful about Steven is that he trusted the cast to do exactly what is in the film. He didn’t really give us a lot of direction. The only thing we really talked about was the choreography so that we didn’t bump into him or into each other and the walls.

Liang: We ended up getting together in our own time. Lucy, Eddie, Chris, and I did a lot of Zooms together, and then I was able to relax and feel more comfortable. I remember talking with Lucy and Chris and saying, “So, none of us have gotten any notes from Steven. It’s not just me!”

Liu: It was kind of like theater, so every take had to be on point. We had to be ready to go. That’s why we did these Zoom rehearsals because our dialogue had to be very natural and jumping on top of each other at the right moment.

Liang: I thought that this idea of the ghost being the camera was going to be the hardest part, but that all worked quite smoothly. The most challenging thing for me was just getting out of my own head. Coming onto this project was a big step for me. It’s only my second film, but I feel like I’ve experienced such different types of directing now, and I’m more prepared to take on other roles with other directors and confidently explore my craft.

Since Steven wasn’t keen on giving notes, was there ever an exchange of advice on acting between you?

Liu: Not really, because I thought she was doing such a phenomenal job. I just told her to go easy on herself because she really was beating herself up. Actors get used to constantly being told to do this, do that. Some directors can’t not give direction; they can’t stop it. But I think if you’re doing it right, then they don’t need to. But frankly, it is strange at times to work in a vortex where nobody’s telling you, “Do this faster” or funnier or whatever it is.

Liang: Nobody came directly to me and gave me advice, but being in a creative environment with someone like Lucy, watching her from afar and taking in her energy, was inspiring. I could just see how she holds herself and take that into my own performance. She just made me feel so comfortable, and we always had such a laugh. I remember I asked for her skin-care routine because I was just shocked at how beautiful she was, as close as I was to her in real life.

So, Lucy, what is your skin-care routine?

Liu: Honestly? I told Callina that she didn’t need to do anything. She’s so young and beautiful. People do all these peels and things, and it looks good—but I think you only have so many skin cells, and I wonder if it’s taking away from another part of your life? I don’t know! I’m not a dermatologist or scientist. I don’t do facials. I don’t wash my face with soap all the time, unless I’ve done some massive press tour. I use a washcloth all the time and whatever I have in my medicine cabinet. I was just telling someone earlier that I really don’t want to open up a cabinet and have 17 things anymore. I just want three. I’ve become really minimalist in terms of products. I think sometimes you can overdo it.

It’s funny because I was always criticized when I was younger for my skin. I have freckles, and my mother would say we have to get rid of them. All my life I’ve been told it should be this pure, porcelain skin, which, by the way, Callina does have. Now, I’ve come to accept that this is my face. These are the freckles.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.