In April of 1997, a group of psychologists published a paper revealing that they had engineered love in a lab. All it took was 36 questions.

There are a few classic dinner table icebreakers, like #1: Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?; and #6: If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?; as well as the more intimate, relationship-building questions like #21: What roles do love and affection play in your life?; and #24: How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

​While these 36 questions are often not-so-subtly posed on first dates and woven into conversations with unknowing crushes, Havana Rose Liu has a different history with this questionnaire. When the situation calls for it, the 28-year-old actor-model-dancer-artist will invoke these questions to romance the characters she plays, on the stage and screen.

​“I like to think about your relationship to a character as being like a romantic or a friendship relationship,” Liu says via Zoom call from her home in Brooklyn, New York. In the midst of her recent return to her life after a year straight of working on location and promoting the myriad of films she’s added to her growing filmography (“I think I’ve been home for about three weeks total this year,” she says), Liu tells me how her characters haven’t truly left her.

​“I still feel like I’m finding more of the threads,” she says. “Sometimes that is the worst feeling and the best feeling ever.”

​“If you put so much mental and emotional energy into anything, I think it ends up creating patterns and mysteries in your life,” she says. “Especially when I’ve been working on a project for a long time, those little bits of symbols and things stick with me in my day-to-day life in a pretty intense way.”

​We agree that it’s almost like the period immediately following a breakup: seeing pieces of a former lover in unexpected places. Given the range of characters Liu has inhabited lately, those reminders might manifest as almost anything. This spring, two of her films arrived in US theaters back-to-back: Daniel Roher’s crime thriller Tuner, opposite Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman, and John Carney’s musical comedy Power Ballad, co-starring Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas. Within days, Nicolas Winding Refn’s nightmarish sci-fi thriller Her Private Hell premiered at Cannes. Liu has since wrapped Peaches, a fast-paced comedy she calls “kinetic and giggly and strange,” and Alex Garland’s much-anticipated fantasy epic Elden Ring, adapted from the eponymous video game. She also appears alongside Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti in Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, arriving this December.

​“This moment of suddenly being in hiatus is actually really interesting because it’s the first moment where I haven’t felt such a specific purpose and drive towards making something come alive,” she tells me. “The only thing I’m responsible for right now is myself, and that freaks me the fuck out. You can’t play another life without having a life of your own. Actually re-fertilizing the soil is so important. It just always is a little bit scary.”

​Over the last month or so, Liu has undergone the process of slowly returning to herself. In the background of her Zoom frame, there’s a brown paper easel, with a few sheets hanging on the wall behind her. She apologizes for the disarray, saying she’s intentionally putting off any creative projects for the time being because her home looks like “a tornado,” but perhaps it’s fitting for this moment of rediscovery. “I’ve been in this mushy phase,” she says. “When I’m working, I listen to playlists or music that directly links to characters. So when I’m not, then I go like, ‘Whoa, what do I like anymore that’s mine?’” 

​This search for belonging, for personal ownership in the broadest sense of the world, is a quest Liu is embarking on after searching tirelessly for belonging in service of other people, of other ideas. When I ask, she gives me a list of her favorite things about acting, one of which is the sense of duty that being in service to another person’s creative vision gives her. “There’s just something so amazing about being able to be a body for other people’s visions and dreams,” she says. “It actually can take the ego out of it.”

​Liu’s philosophy makes it clear how she’s able to morph so seamlessly between these different worlds—whether it be stylized noir, dark fantasy, or raunchy comedy. When it comes to choosing her projects, she’s moved most often by directors and their visions. “I do think in some world you very platonically marry your director,” she says, explaining how collaborations such as these often come out of an interpersonal connection, friendship, or acquaintance.

​Sometimes, these connections come from the job itself. Liu worked with actors Kristine Froseth and Sophie Thatcher on Her Private Hell, after previously working with Froseth on a preceding project (Off-Broadway’s All Nighter) and Thatcher on the subsequent gig (Peaches). Liu likens the experience to a year-long do-si-do: “And now I take this partner here, and then the next [partner],” she says, mimicking the dance’s swaying give-and-take. 

​Liu found a companion in Thatcher while working together across two vastly different back-to-back productions. “It was really fun to have somebody to link arms with through those two experiences because we could reflect on the whiplash of it all,” she continues. “We learned similar things on Nick’s project that then allowed us to take some of that into the other one.” 

​Maybe this is what Liu is searching for in every collaboration: a symbiotic metamorphosis. She talks about acting, friendship and love in much the same way—as relationships that make both people larger than they were before. “There is something about, to me, really good friendship [that] helps both people expand,” she says. “The thing that brings me some of the most joy ever is loving someone so much and watching them become more and more themselves and more capable of the things that they love to do.”

​Now that she’s returned home to Brooklyn and is able to reconnect with those friendships face to face, Liu has found herself reconsidering what it means to be at home, to return. “I’ve started to think of home more as my body than as where I live,” she tells me. “That sounds so ridiculous, but it is how I have to think about it, otherwise I think I’ll go crazy.” 

​That constant state of movement, though sometimes disorienting, is a motivating force for Liu. “When something ends, I never know what I want to do next,” she says. “One project, if it’s horror, I find myself—I feel like I crave opposition.” She describes her career as a pendulum, moving toward whatever feels newly “exciting or magnetic” after she has squeezed herself dry in another direction.

​“I feel a little bit addicted to the growth edge,” Liu says. “If I’m not feeling a little bit challenged by something, or like it’s helping me learn something new in some way, I feel like I’m not expanding or helpful to the project in the way I would want to be.” Liu chooses her projects based on intuition, mostly, without a set list of guidelines or checklist of requirements. “If it lights something up, then I follow that. It’s very hunch-based, largely.” Sometimes she is intellectually preoccupied with a subject; other times, “a project feels like a bit” of someone she loves. “It does feel very individual to the project that comes in, and if it feels like I have something in me that is itching to be explored there.”

​Of course, Liu’s itch for variety extends to different mediums, too. She grew up dancing, then was street-cast as a model while walking through Washington Square Park as an NYU student. “Modeling for me felt like a really interesting midpoint between what I was doing at the time, which was more composition-based fine art, and where I’ve now ended up in acting,” she says. “You’re inside of a story, and you’re in collaboration with other people, but you’re also making a piece of art that way.”

​Fashion still offers Liu the possibility of becoming someone new, if only for the night. “I think of clothes as art for the body,” she says. “Everything is self-expressive if you let it be.” What excites her most is the way fashion “offers a sense of reinvention and play in one’s life.” The transformation is intuitive: an outfit either brings her closer to her true self, or it doesn’t. “Something locks in, and you’re like, ‘This is right. I’m here.’”

​I ask Liu how she would describe her personal taste, and which motifs and designs feel most right to her, but she’s unable to choose. “It’s always changing,” she says. “I’m very inspired by all of it, which makes my apartment look like a flea market.” Liu attributes that openness to the same impulse that draws her toward acting: “I just love bits from a lot of different aesthetic worlds, which is probably why acting is a good job for me. I get to just kind of try out all of the things that I like to do.”

​Even in transit, Liu finds small pockets of privacy in which to hear herself think. “I have a rule where I do not get the Wi-Fi on planes,” she says. “My team doesn’t like that, but I like it.” Suspended between one place and the next, she writes. “Planes also make me more open-hearted when I’m up there,” she says. “Sometimes it’s journaling, sometimes it’s more creative. But that’s my favorite place to write.”

​With so many of Liu’s creative endeavors involving an audience, her writing is a craft she keeps to herself. “I write poetry all the time, but just for myself. No one else reads it ever,” she says. “I do write a lot, actually. I just don’t share it.” 

In her private world, in her home, Liu is still working on making her space authentically her own. “I was thinking about how nice it would be to hang a parachute in my room, like, over my bed, and maybe conceal some lights above it,” she says. So much as a quirky design choice prompts a line of self-psychoanalysis. “What does this mean?” she asks. “Am I in freefall?” Maybe it’s an omen, maybe it’s a failsafe. Regardless, Havana Rose Liu is ready for the adventure. “I can fall anywhere because I have my parachute.”

Photographed by Arno Frugier

Styled by Austen Turner at The Wall Group

Written by Abby Shewmaker

Hair: Blake Erik at Forward Artists

Makeup: Benjamin Puckey at The Wall Group

Flaunt Film: Leo Hsu

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