Scream QUEEN

CHASE SUI WONDERS battles serial killers and bloodthirsty paparazzi with equal aplomb

Vanities / Opening Act

GROWING UP, CHASE Sui Wonders wouldn't be caught dead at a slasher movie. But she stopped being afraid of them after making the horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies—which is a good thing, because in July she's headlining a sequel to the '90s classic I Know What You Did Last Summer. She was thrilled to make the movie with two of the original's stars, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. "They were so welcoming. They were so willing to hang," she says.

Sui Wonders has been surrounded by her idols a lot lately. She plays an ambitious newbie executive in Apple TV+'s hit The Studio, a part she nabbed after star and cocreator Seth Rogen asked her to improvise. "My heart sank into my gut," she says. "it went on for what felt like 10 minutes, and then he lit up a joint and said, 'Great work.' " The role allowed her to perform wild comedy—and now she's craving more. "I just want to play complicated characters," she says. "Women who are unafraid to be crazy or weird or ugly."

As a kid, Sui Wonders says, she didn't have any friends in elementary school. Instead, she spent all her time with her three siblings watching movies and making their own films. (Creativity runs in the family: Her aunt is the designer Anna Sui.) Yet she didn't plan to pursue filmmaking or acting when she was accepted to Harvard. "My plan was to study astrophysics," she says. "I was like, 'This is what people go to Harvard to do.' "

That changed after she started failing astrophysics classes. Sui Wonders majored in film studies and production, wrote for The Harvard Lampoon, and got an agent, thanks to help from a friend working in the agency's mail room. Even then she wasn't sure she'd make it. "I was seriously flirting with this idea that I would just say goodbye to it all and become a corporate drone in Beijing."

Then she wrote a script, booked a role on the HBO Max show Generation, and landed Bodies Bodies Bodies. In the latter Sui Wonders played Emma, an actor brought to a "hurricane party" by her boyfriend, played by Pete Davidson. Life started to imitate art when Sui Wonders and Davidson began dating. They reportedly broke up less than a year later, but the experience taught her about the uglier aspects of Hollywood. "I learned early on in my career how nasty that side of the business is," she says. "Hollywood can play a lot of tricks on you. It's so seductive, with events and the flashing lights and the people calling your name. It's very easy to get swept up in that."

Sui Wonders hasn't always felt as if the industry was bursting with opportunities for people of mixed ethnicity like her (she's half Asian). "I would try so hard and I would put myself on tape, but it never felt quite right," she says.

That, too, is changing. Her part in The Studio wasn't originally written for a biracial actor. She was interested in I Know What You Did Last Summer largely because "you just don't see that many people who look like me playing these kind of leading ingenue roles," she says. "The thing that I originally felt very complicated about has now become sort of my superpower."

And though her acting career has taken off, Sui Wonders still has plans to write and direct. In 2022 she made and costarred in a short film called Wake; she hopes to collaborate soon with her sister, who is also a filmmaker. The possibilities now seem endless, "it feels like the world has opened up to me as I've opened up to myself."

REBECCA FORD