Lana Condor spent the better part of last year trying not to spill her guts. It’s fitting, given that her RECENT film, The Devil’s Mouth, pits her against cinema’s most enduring monster: a shark.While death by a predator with large teeth and a singular mission is a pretty gnarly fate, Condor thinks, “When you’re left to your own devices…that is a lot scarier [than any monster].”

The Amazon MGM Studios film, which follows a group of friends whose post-grad trip to Thailand goes seriously awry, bears that out. For all its blood and terror, The Devil’s Mouth actually says a lot less about a shark than it does about the humans forced to confront it.

Condor spent three months in Thailand shooting the survival thriller alongside Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania’s Kathryn Newton, The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Gavin Casalegno, and indie stars Nico Hiraga and Tommi Rose. With only three dry scenes, an entirely practical set, and a motorized shark fin following her like a shadow, the 29-year-old actress got scuba certified just to survive the shoot.

“It was one of those experiences where you don’t feel like you’re acting. You don’t feel like it’s a job, because the environment that the filmmakers created for us was so extreme,” Condor says, recounting a particularly challenging two-week sequence that required her and her co-stars to hold their breaths for four to five minutes at a time.

“I’m so fucking happy I didn’t drown,” she says, acknowledging that fear is surprisingly easy to manufacture when the danger feels real.

Theatrical and talkative, Condor punctuates every sentence with a demonstration. Just by the way she triangulates her hands above her head to form the eerily recognizable signal for, SHARK!, it’s clear she glows when she performs. Her natural charisma makes it easy to forget she’s simply sitting in the backyard of her Los Angeles home. With her black hair wavy and undone, Condor swims in a massive white tee shirt as she paddles her arms and gasps for air.

Despite the daring conditions of the subaquatic shoot, The Devil’s Mouth isn’t Condor’s first run-in with action. While she cemented her place in the rom-com archives with her portrayal of Lara-Jean Covey in Netflix’s 2018 To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the inception of her career can be pinpointed to her appearance as Jubilee in the 2016 X-Men: Apocalypse. Possessing other high-powered credits in Alita: Battle Angel, the militaristic Valiant One, and the recent bloody ballet title Pretty Lethal with Uma Thurman, Condor’s performance in The Devil’s Mouth is less a departure than a return to familiar territory. 

Yet, her slate is anything but singular, as the actress shares she’s excited for fans to regard her comedic range in Warner Bros. and Ketchup Entertainment’s Coyote vs. Acme, where she stars opposite Will Forte and John Cena.

“For the past two and a half [to] three years, I’ve been in my sowing era, where I [was] putting down all these seeds, and for whatever reason, they all decided to come out this year. This year, I’m hoping, is my reaping era,” she affirms.

After exploring a breadth of genres throughout her career, Condor has come to an unexpected conclusion. Loving and fighting take completely different stamina. The challenge of performing isn’t just physically surviving the day, but making audiences believe that she’s really living it. The same principle applies to real life, only this time she’s tasked with convincing herself.

This realization came on the heels of filming Whodunnit, a BuzzFeed Studios rom-com that sees Condor play Tess Klein, a woman attempting to find the father of her child after a particularly eventful rebound weekend.

“I thought that Whodunnit was going to be a walk in the park. I’m dry. There are no sharks. I’m in Portland!” she says, laughing. “But, I would find myself overanalyzing more. Did the chemistry work in this scene? Am I coming off charming enough, but relatable, but flawed, and all these things? Is it enough for people to want to believe that they too can fall in love?”

“I think it’s easy for me to make the audience feel scared when, you know, your body’s in a shark,” she continues. “Capturing an aura that allows audiences to feel safe is so much harder.”

For Condor, creating that sense of safety began not by spilling her guts, but by listening to them. She started tapping into something innately human, not monstrous and larger than life, and found herself latched onto an elusive but powerful concept: hope.

In her own life, “hope” has been tested time and time again. Having been born in Can Tho, Vietnam, she and her older brother were adopted by her parents when she was four months old. She jumped around often after being brought to America, living in Illinois, Washington, New York, and California.

“I moved all over when I was a kid. My parents are the loves of my life, but I think because I was always moving around, I was always a little unrooted,” she says.

At 15 years old, she made the decision to stay in Los Angeles to dance at the Los Angeles Ballet while pursuing a career in Hollywood, a choice that allowed her to begin laying the groundwork. By her 20s, following the Netflix-charting success of To All the Boys, she had a sturdy foundation, but life had a way of diverting her path. 

In July 2024, the death of her mother, Mary, threw her off course. In an Instagram post following her passing, Condor described the feeling of being carved out and lost without her.

However, in her tribute, she also scribed this: “You taught me…That seeing the world thru humor filled lenses is not only one of our best survival techniques, but also a brave choice, that can improve our daily lives exponentially.”

Reflecting, Condor says, “We have one life, and as much as sometimes we feel like we don’t have the choice of how we choose to live it, we actually do…You can chase that joy.”

She looks upwards towards the beams diagonally lining her ceiling. Candidly, she shares, “Losing my mom made me change the way that I want to operate. You realize that you have things to lose.”

Two years later, Condor is proof of the resilience it takes to face life head on. She can’t stop making pizza dough. She takes her puppy, Bunny, to the vet. She tends to her garden and has a newfound hobby in coloring. These aren’t distractions from life, but evidence of it.

It helps, she says, to have Anthony De La Torre in her corner, her husband and partner of nearly 11 years.

“He taught me how to drive…bad bitch aside, I would be ass up in a ditch without him,” she remarks, smiling. “He is my home.”

Her relationship with De La Torre was born from a happenstance glance from across the room and Condor’s decisive intuition. The two met at an Emmys after-party in 2015 when then-18-year-old Condor asked for his number. They’ve been together ever since.

“I will always choose my instinct over anything,” she says, resolvedly. De La Torre is living proof that it hasn’t led her astray.

I ask Condor what her instinct is telling her now. She rests her chin on her fist as she thinks.

“My dad’s tagline is, ‘Greatness is coming.’ So, I’m hoping for greatness. I’m hoping for more peace,” she responds.

The action of hoping might be the most terrifying beast of them all, but fear not. Lana Condor’s got guts.

Photographed by Cody Cloud

Styled by Maren Taylor at The Wall Group

Written by Julia Zara

Hair: Jacob Aaron at Opus Beauty

Makeup: Francie Tomalonis at The Visionairies

Flaunt Film Editor: Sophie Saunders

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