It sounds like the kind of thing middle school nightmares are made of: being asked to play piano in front of an expectant audience with little practice. But this was Havana Rose Liu’s reality for her latest film, Tuner.
The movie — the narrative debut from Oscar-winning documentarian Daniel Roher (Navalny) — follows an apprentice piano tuner, Niki (Leo Woodall), with an auditory condition that proves useful as he tries to ease the financial burdens of his mentor (Dustin Hoffman) by moonlighting as a safecracker. For her part, Liu is Ruthie, a driven music composition graduate student who starts a relationship with Niki.
Like so many adolescents, the 27-year-old New York native left piano behind, lured by the siren call of, well, literally anything else. “I found piano extraordinarily beautiful, but I also found practicing to be a real slog,” says Liu. There was a brief affair with the violin, but she left any musical aspirations for good somewhere in the preteens.
“I got rebellious, and I decided that I didn’t want to be a pianist anymore, and I really regret it. As we all do when we’re adults, we wish we had some fluency over an instrument,” admits Liu. “What a missed opportunity!”
It was an opportunity that came back around after being cast as Ruthie, who bonds with Niki over their shared love of the piano.
“What makes those characters work is that they are truly aficionados at what they do and deeply talented,” says Liu. “I was thinking, ‘If I don’t sell this, then audiences won’t believe that this is what’s so important to them.’ ”
To prep for the role, Liu worked with two piano teachers and practiced for a couple of hours every day for two months leading up to the production. The work paid off and, in the movie, she convincingly plays a studied pianist, a feat that’s been singled out in reviews out of the Telluride Film Festival, where the film premiered before its Sept. 8 TIFF screening.
Like piano, acting was never something Liu envisioned herself doing. She was street cast while still a student at New York University, after which background and commercial work eventually turned into features. She has since become a festival mainstay with films like SXSW breakout Bottoms, where she stars opposite Ayo Edebiri, and Lurker, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival before being snapped up by indie distributor du jour Mubi. Upcoming projects include the Mark Ruffalo TV series Hal & Harper and Michael Showalter’s holiday comedy Oh. What. Fun.
Several years after being inadvertently diverted into a profession, she is still happy to be pursuing an acting career. “There is always the question for myself, ‘OK, do I want to keep doing this?’ I do think it’s an active choice. It’s almost like being in a relationship — you actively choose to be with that person every day.”
When taking on Tuner, Liu was also drawn to the relationship Ruthie had with Harry, played by a delightful Hoffman. “A person once told me, ‘You have grandparent energy.’ It’s something about being comfortable and raised by or spending a lot of time with people from older generations,” says Liu.
That includes Liu’s own grandmother, who she says was the sole source of familial musical talent. “My grandmother wanted to be an opera singer, so growing up she was always singing around the house,” Liu remembers. In the lead-up to filming Tuner, her grandmother died, with the actress finding some peace in playing Ruthie. “The character had an emotional fragility to her that I found very compelling and a good container for all of the complexity I was feeling about my own loss.” (In the film, Ruthie says her piano was a gift from her late grandmother.)
It is notable — or, at the very least, coincidental — that Tuner isn’t the end of Liu’s onscreen musical career turn. Up next for the actress is Jesse Eisenberg’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning A Real Pain, a musical comedy in which she will star opposite Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti. Then there is Power Ballad, the latest from Once and Begin Again director John Carney.
“In my own life, I have become extremely connected and appreciative of music in more recent years, so maybe that’s a part of it,” guesses Liu as to why she keeps being put into music-centric work. “Maybe I’m supposed to be a musician? What is the universe telling me?”