Lola Tung taped her audition for the lead role in The Summer I Turned Pretty, Isabel “Belly” Conklin, at the suggestion of her new manager. At the time, the freshman Carnegie Mellon acting major was focused on her schoolwork; she hadn’t even read the best-selling Jenny Han book on which the series is based. She couldn’t have imagined that less than a year later, she would be on a Wilmington, North Carolina, set starring as a confident 16-year-old girl coming into her own during her family’s annual beach vacation.
“The whole summer of filming was just a learning process,” Tung tells Vanity Fair about landing the lead. Her entire audition process—including her initial meetings with Han, who also created the series, and chemistry reads with potential castmates—was done via Zoom. The newcomer didn’t meet Han in person until shortly before the shoot. Then she quickly had to adapt to acting in front of cameras, also a first for the actress.
“I think we all got more comfortable as the summer went along, and everyone was really…patient with us,” says the bubbly New Yorker, who laughs easily and often. Tung’s natural performance—she says she’s curious and headstrong, like Belly, but slightly less spontaneous—can probably be credited to the training that she received at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts—a.k.a. the Fame school—whose recent alumni also include Timothée Chalamet, Jharrel Jerome, and Ansel Elgort. (That’s where Tung’s manager first saw her perform.)
“For me, everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August,” a pink-glasses-wearing, younger version of Belly says in voiceover as The Summer I Turned Pretty opens. The Prime Video series centers on the now blossoming teen as she and her older brother Steven (Sean Kaufman), a Princeton hopeful, spend the summer with their divorced writer mom Laurel (Jackie Chung) at the beach house of Laurel’s college friend, Susannah Fisher (Rachel Blanchard), and her two hunky teenage sons. Conrad (Christopher Briney)—whom Belly has always had a crush on—has turned sulky, quitting football, and smoking pot. Easygoing Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) secretly likes Belly, but isn’t thrilled she’s following his mother’s idea to become a debutante. Complicating the old friends’ dynamic and the possible love triangle between Belly and the Fisher boys is the troubling news Susannah and Laurel are keeping from the kids.
By Dana Hawley/Amazon Studios.
“I knew that the most crucial piece of the whole show really hinged on Belly, and being in on her journey, and being invested in her story and watching her come of age,” Han tells V.F. about her protagonist, who also serves as the series’ narrator. (Tung also recently rerecorded the three audio books that make up the trilogy.) Though casting a rookie was risky, Han did so because “there’s a certain kind of freshness to the character that I really wanted to be sincere…. The first time I saw [Tung’s] tape, she just had this quality that made me root for her. And I felt like that’s what the character needed as well.” The production had an acting coach on standby for its inexperienced stars, but never needed to call on them.
The first-time coshowrunner—she has most recently been in South Korea overseeing the upcoming To All the Boys spin-off, XO, Kitty, starring Anna Cathcart—also wasn’t limited by what she had written in her 2009 novel. Han updated her characters to “reflect what 2022 looks like.” Belly is now Asian American like Tung; Jeremiah is bisexual; and her characters text and use social media.