How ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Star Lola Tung Went From Cousins Beach to ‘Hadestown’

“I can’t even believe it,” the 21-year-old Tung says of her rousing first show a few days later. She is soft-spoken both by nature and for practical reasons: Now that she’s appearing in eight shows a week, preserving her voice is essential. Drinking orange juice, tea, and water—lots of water—has helped. One thing she quickly noticed about her Hadestown castmates was that they hydrated constantly. “Everybody’s got a water bottle at all times that they’re carrying around with them everywhere,” Tung says; now she does, too. And despite being young, famous, and living in New York City, she also (mostly) spends her nights in. “You really just have to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself—sometimes choosing to go home and sleep instead of going out and doing something with your friends,” she explains.

Tung grew up in New York during a period when, for the first time in decades, Broadway and mainstream culture had become one in the same. She remembers seeing Hamilton in the eighth grade—she purchased an “A.Ham” hat afterwards—and the original cast of Dear Evan Hansen inspiring the kind of brief yet intense obsession that only a teenage girl can sustain. “That was a very, very important show to me for a while,” she says, laughing. Compounding all that was her enrollment at LaGuardia, the performing arts high school made famous by Fame. Everyone was always talking about Broadway because they all wanted to be on it.

Tung did one musical there, Cinderella, in which she played a lady in waiting; she then went on to Carnegie Mellon to study drama. But her life changed her freshman year when she was cast as the lead character, “Belly,” in The Summer I Turned Pretty, an explosively popular Prime Video show based on Jenny Han’s best-selling coming-of-age novel.

Eurydice—a beautiful but jaded young nymph in ripped tights and dark, smudged eyeliner—is certainly a departure from the naive, love-torn Belly.“Did you find any overlap between these two characters?” I ask, before backtracking: “Eh, there actually may be no overlap.” She laughs at my attempt to connect the demonic, soul-crushing Greek underworld of Hades to the teenage dreamland of Cousins Beach, where characters make out on golf courses and flirt at boardwalk amusement parks.