Havana Rose Liu on joy, grief and growing up: the Gen Z star of Bottoms and Afraid opens up about roots and romance in Style’s exclusive interview

“It’s true!” The 27-year-old laughs wholeheartedly while recounting the memory to Style. “I was having a really beautiful day, and newly falling in love with somebody. It was a warm day and I was in a red dress – I was literally just skipping and frolicking through Washington Square Park on my way to my next class.”

Fortunately for her growing number of admirers, Liu is a firm believer in going wherever the wind takes her. That little jaunt through the park eventually led to supporting roles in films like Mayday and The Sky is Everywhere, and later a leading role in the 2022 thriller No Exit. Then came her star turn playing a cheerleader in 2023’s Bottoms, in which she co-stars alongside The Bear’s Ayo Edibiri and supermodel Kaia Gerber.

“When I tell the story it genuinely sounds like I’m making up a silly fairy tale version of how this happened,” Liu says about that fateful encounter. Indeed, if the word serendipity could be defined by a person, Liu would fit the bill. Her persona is as warm as summer, her voice sweet as honey. Fresh out of a dance class she calls “dance church” when I catch up with her, she speaks energetically and openly about her unconventional path to stardom.

“An old friend who I grew up dancing with, invited me to go,” she says of the class, “and we just danced like hooligans together for 70 minutes – it was beautiful.” Liu is a dancer and performance artist at heart, having studied wellness and art activism at NYU. “If I’m moving and dancing regularly, it just makes me feel more connected to myself, my soul and other people. It’s like medicine for me, which sounds trite, but it’s true.”

This free-spirited approach colours all aspects of her life and stems largely from growing up in New York, she says. With fashion, for instance, the short-sighted actress says she gets her sense of style from guessing what people walking on the street are wearing. From meeting strangers on the subway to sheltering in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighbourhood during the pandemic when she first started acting, Liu says it is the city’s tough exterior yet artistic soul that keeps her going and grounded. That’s even as her relationship with it – what she calls the “possibility and mystery of the public world” – has inevitably changed with her rising fame.

“Is this masochistic that I’ve now found some deep romance to the rats and the grit of it all? It feels better to romanticise than not. But part of why I love living in the city is no one gives a f*** who you are anyway, no matter if my anonymity is shot.”