Summer School with Lola Tung

Lola Tung's casting as the lead in Prime Video's The Summer I Turned Pretty fulfills a dream she's had since she played the Tin Man in a sixth-grade production of The Wizard of Oz. The actress studied drama at LaGuardia High School, aka New York's Fame school of the arts, and at Carnegie Mellon University. During her freshman year of college, she was cast in Summer, her first professional role.

"It was a completely different learning experience," she says. "I had no idea there would be so many camera setups just to do one scene! And how long that takes."

YA author Jenny Han (To All the Boys I've Loved Before) adapted season one of The Summer I Turned Pretty from her 2009 book of the same name. Set in a fictional town called Cousins Beach, it's the coming-of-age story of Isabel "Belly" Conklin, who grapples with her feelings for her mother's best friend's two sons, with whom she summers every year.

A drama about a teen love triangle could easily skew cutesy, but Tung's portrayal grounds the story. Her most challenging scene was in the season one finale, she says. After the kids learn that Belly's mom's best friend has terminal cancer, she and her brother crawl into bed with their mother and they cling together and cry.

"I was nervous about it; it's such a big scene," Tung says. "But doing it with Jackie [Chung, who plays her mom] and Sean [Kaufman, as her brother], who are such wonderful actors and people, made it so much easier. We had become a family at that point."

As she awaits the release of season two on July 14, Tung says her off-screen family is just as supportive. She quotes her dad's advice as words she lives by: "When I call him and tell him about an event or something about the show, he always says, 'Keep doing it if you love it, and don't get a big head!' It's the simplest but best advice."

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #7, 2023, under the title, "Summer School."