Havana Rose Liu Graduates 'All Nighter' With Flying Colors

Havana Rose Liu didn’t set out to be an actress; she wanted to pursue performance art. At New York University, she built on her background as a dancer by developing her own major that explored the intersection of art, activism, and wellness. Before graduating in 2019, she created cookbooks and audio tours about the fetishization of minority cultures. One particularly moving live piece she created examined relationships and proximity by having her and an ex stare at each other through plexiglass for an extended period of time.

But being scouted by a modeling agent on the street just outside campus put Liu on a different trajectory. She then began doing background work for film, TV, and music videos, eventually landing her breakout roles in cult-loved movies like 2022’s No Exit and 2023's Bottoms. But when I met her, on a sunny Monday in April, it seemed the 27-year-old New York native had been able to reconnect with her performance art rooms for the first time in years—and reveled in it.

Every night for the past two months, Liu has been using her body, making improvisational choices, and interacting with a live audience in the new Off-Broadway play All Nighter. Starring in the all-women production written by Natalie Margolin and directed by Jaki Bradley was an experience Liu now realizes she “needed.”

“I feel like all of it has been this big recentering,” Liu tells Marie Claire the week before her final shows, seated in the lobby of The Newman Mills Theatre. She looks comfortable and ready for her show in two hours, wearing her long, wavy hair down and dressed in a sheeny pair of navy slacks and a white blouse. She spent most of her time there this spring, performing eight shows per week of the one-act about five seniors on their last all-nighter of their college careers.

Before the project came her way, the actress felt a bit “adrift.” She had been taking on role after role—while they were buzzy projects and amazing opportunities, like the recent Sundance hits Lurker and Hal Harper, and the undated but soon-to-be blockbusters Power Ballad, opposite Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas, and Leo Woodell-led thriller Tuner—they still left her feeling isolated away from her home in New York. All Nighter was like “a coming home in a lot of different ways,” Liu says, referring to being back in her city, her body, and how it “reinvigorated [her] appreciation for acting.”

Since it opened to previews on February 25 and the public on March 9, All Nighter has more or less become the “it girl” show in the N.Y.C. theater scene. Its relatable subject matter and cast of beloved up-and-comers have inspired Gen Z to turn out in droves. Liu notes how much it’s touched her to talk to young people after every performance, especially fans who have told her that All Nighter was their first play. “To bring young people to the theater, to introduce them to theater, is a huge honor,” she says.

The show marked Liu and fellow rising film/TV ingénue Kristine Froseth’s first-ever plays, but they had mentors in their costars, Broadway favorites like Sex Lives of College Girls alum Alyah Chanelle Scott and Tony-nominees Kathryn Gallagher and Julia Lester. (The team behind All Nighter confirms Liu and Froseth will not be able to complete the entire 12-week run of the show, as planned, due to scheduling conflicts with a film they were both cast in in late April.)

The coming-of-age play found its way to Liu after a theater agent at her agency encouraged her to try out a few workshops. “I had the best fucking time ever,” she says. “Most of my process has been so alone or with a director one-on-one. This felt like we were all agreeing on some of the group choices, and I felt really un-alone in that moment. I felt such a companionship and community with everyone.”

She also connected to the complexities of female friendship in the story, and how, despite being set in 2014, the issues it raises remain prescient. “The writing is so smart and truthful in terms of how it tackles the way that young women speak to each other, especially in small liberal arts environments. I feel like I chewed on the material in a way that made me hungry for more.” After first reading for Scott’s character, Tessa, and feeling hesitant to try out another part, she read for Lizzy. Her gentleness immediately struck her: “She bore a little home in my heart.”

Lizzy is the peacekeeper in the show’s central friend group and, as is later revealed, is dealing with trauma from earlier in her college experience. Liu shares, “Lizzy has helped me look at what clarity can do for anxiety and how much buying into a group truth versus a singular truth can cost someone.”

The tone of All Nighter shifts entirely when Lizzy faces what she’s been repressing and how she’s coped with what happened to her. “Some nights, I feel sad to bring [the audience] there,” the performer says. “I feel like, Everyone is having such a good time. I don’t want to burst the bubble, but then I’m like, How beautiful that we get to hold this together. It changes with the performance, too, because you can hear people reverberating with it or responding. It makes me feel like I’m not performing it; I am holding it with everyone.”

Liu has held a special experience with her castmates, too. “[All Nighter] surprised me in all the ways that I didn’t even know that I needed,” she says, noting how she now understands how much she was looking for a source of community after spending a lot of downtime on film sets alone. “Part of my job is to put myself in a lack of safety, the unknown, all the time. Part of what's cool about this project has been that I'm allowed to feel safe and also unsafe in all the craziness of doing a play every night, and all the crazy things can happen—but ultimately really, really safe.”

The fivesome's bond extended past the stage. They spent every Sunday night at Gallagher’s, where she cooked for them. Liu and Scott had dressing room dance parties to Fred again.. before every curtain call. Hell's Kitchen margaritas were a post-stage door must.

“It's been quite healing to be feeling so understood and like I really have their back and they have mine,” says Liu. “I hope they stay my friends for a very long time.”

All Nighter has also made Liu discover quite a bit about herself. When I ask her what she’s learned from the experience, she starts to get emotional. “Every night we tap like, I have your back, to each other. But I think I didn't realize how much I had my own back,” she admits, leaning forward and softening her voice. “I've been proud of the days when something starts to go awry, or I start to feel scared or self-doubt, and then I choose a different choice. I hold myself and love myself through it, and make the next decision that can release that.”

“I also really have learned about how many ways one moment can play…a scene can be 35+ different things and they can all be amazing,” she continues. “That has made me also feel really differently about being alive. Every situation can be re-narrativized in a new way. In my own way, life has felt like I can bring myself to it in the way I do my play, where I know that I just have to make the next right choice and do the next right thing to get back on track in some way.” Liu laughs and says she’s unsure if I expected her to give such a “pyscho-spiritual answer.”

Liu will take her final bow as Lizzy on Friday. The show will continue its limited engagement through mid-May, with The Pitt’s Isa Briones taking over the role. (Froseth’s Darcie will now be played by AnnaSophia Robb.) In the coming months, Liu has a bounty of projects to begin production on—like a star-studded musical written/directed by Jesse Eisenberg for A24, and a NEON-helmed Nicolas Winding Refn film, in which she’ll reteam with Froseth and star opposite fellow film Twitter faves Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton. It seems likely that the creative buzz she caught from All Nighter will carry with her, not unlike what she felt in her own years in undergrad.

“I was really on a steep learning curve of what it meant to switch from film and TV to theater...I think it's rare that this happens, but in all the ways that I hoped this would push me to grow, it really has,” she says. “It's really broadened my understanding of the craft and even my passions.”

Liu adds, “I'm still actively processing aloud what this experience is and how fruitful it's been and why. I find myself lying in bed, being like, Wow, this was an incredible moment.”

Like most college seniors, she notes, “I feel already nostalgic.”