‘The Morning Show’ Star Greta Lee On Stella’s Season 4 Arc & The Novelty Of Letting Women In Power Make Mistakes: “It’s Basically A Privilege To Be Able To F*ck Up”

SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains spoilers for The Morning Show Season 4 Episode 6.

A deadly combo comes back to bite Stella Bak (Greta Lee) in The Morning Show Season 4 Episode 6, titled “If Then.”

As revealed earlier on in the Apple TV drama’s fourth season, Stella was having an affair with UBN Board President Celine Dumont’s (Marion Cotillard) husband Miles (Aaron Pierre), and her former boss Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) pieced the puzzle together when he found Stella’s lighter in Miles’ loft. Though Cory lets the info slip to Celine as a bargaining chip, another informant spills the beans.

“We talk so much about morality when it comes to women and women in power and being bad or being good. F*cking up, basically is something that hasn’t been historically afforded to women at all. It is basically a privilege to be able to f*ck up,” Greta Lee told Deadline in a week before the sixth episode’s release. “We women, we know that so well, not just women in power, women period, I would say. I’m pleased and not surprised, given all of the high-level women we have working on the show, that we’re able to show that, show all the sides of it, and let the women run amok.”

In a twist of events that lead Stella to pull out her own A.I. project to display at the O24 presentation where big talent was promised by UBN, her double betrays her after she feeds it her own insecurities and truths, which it then regurgitates to an audience of journalists and more. Stella’s A.I. likeness reveals that she has been romantically involved with Miles and also voices that she thinks Diversity and Inclusion don’t work.

“Stella’s from the tech world, and she always has an eye on that. As Cory says, every CEO wants to bring innovative things, to have the good idea that’s going to transform everything. For Stella, she believes it is AI. As we know, AI is impacting all professions,” showrunner Charlotte Stoudt told Deadline in a separate interview. “So it would be foolish of Stella not to consider what it could do for a newsroom. On a deeper level, we were interested in Stella’s AI as her mirror, the place where she could confront herself and ask herself the most difficult questions. That’s borne out of the number of people I know who are using, say, ChatGPT to get advice on a personal question. This is becoming a thing people do, and not just younger people. We were interested in, not only does she seek advice, but her AI double might tell her some things about herself that aren’t particularly flattering.”

Lee, who also just headlined Tron: Ares, which released in theaters October 10, unpacked how her role in that film informed this episode of The Morning Show, where her “workplace marriage” with Cory stands after her downfall and Stella’s future in the below interview.

DEADLINE: What do you feel like Stella’s inner monologue this episode taught you about her as a character and reveals to the audience that maybe they hadn’t had a chance to think about before?

GRETA LEE: Oh gosh, there’s just so much. I think, going into this, years back, in all my wildest dreams and hopes for Stella and what it would mean to get to play someone like her, I was really thinking about women and young women and this new generation of hope. Thinking about the new frontier of media and tech and how the world felt, where it felt like we were moving towards a time and space where anything was possible. It felt like the world was at our fingertips, that jubilant excitement about participating, in terms of inventing new ideas.

I found all of that very inspiring, and it was so deeply resonating with me also as a young woman, also as a woman of color. I’ve had my own experiences navigating the challenges of being me in this world. That being said, I think that the complicated but beautiful surprise that has come from getting to play Stella all these years is understanding the person beneath all of this. We are all so much more than the boxes that we check, and I think that I’ve seen and I can imagine, for someone like Stella — after years of being a righteous warrior in the name of certain ideas on behalf of certain groups — sometimes it comes at a cost, and that is something that I feel for Stella — my love for her and wanting her to experience the freedom of getting to relinquish some of that and be unburdened by that, and to just get to live like everyone else.

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That monologue is this complicated moment that I think so many of us find ourselves in now, of like, “Wait a minute. Wait, what just happened the last few years?” and the frustration and the grief that comes with, “How is it that this is where we’ve ended up?” So much uncertainty. I was just so thrilled and grateful to Charlotte [Stoudt] and Zander [Lehmann], the writers, [for] gifting her the full scope of all of that.

DEADLINE: What were your conversations like with Charlotte and the writers about the theme this season of what happens when the women are in power? Not just Stella, but you have Alex and Celine, and how this arc for her in this episode fits into that theme?

LEE: Not too long ago, I came across a horrific stat, which was [that] there were more CEOs named John in the whole world than there were female CEOs. And I think that was just a few years ago, and that was part of my research in doing whatever that particular season of The Morning Show was, but that was an instant reminder of the specificity of this world that we live in. Now, a few years later, I mean, we’ve seen that women in power, it’s no different than a human in power. Just because you’re female doesn’t mean you are absconded from being fallible.

Women are as different as people are, and we get to experience a myriad of men behaving all sorts of ways. So why should we let them have all the fun? I mean, this is just the reality of it. Women are capable of a lot, good and bad and all the all the shades in between.

DEADLINE: How you think the events of Episode 6 force Stella to reflect on what happened with Mia?

LEE: That is truly one of the most devastating pieces of performance I have ever encountered, I think, in like 20-plus years of this career, specifically because that relationship is so fully loaded, to me. Having two fellow cohorts who are both women, who are both considered outsiders, who are both women of color, navigating a very specific set of challenges that dynamic and the betrayal, ultimately, that happens is so tragic to me.

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When we had to shoot that scene that was horrible, we were crying so much. It put all of our feelings about the world and our frustrations with the world into that breakup. It’s a breakup scene, and how much these two women, they see eye to eye. They have the same dream, and they have this partnership and this belief of painting the world the way that they imagined, and it was beautiful, but the reality, the super harsh reality of the world that they live in and the workplace that they were navigating couldn’t support this dream. There’s just nothing more tragic to me than to look someone in the eye and say, “I’m so sorry.” It was hard.

DEADLINE: With the AI of it all, could you talk about how filming Tron: Ares and this episode informed each other for you?

LEE: I filmed Tron first. Through the process of Tron, I got to meet a lot of AI experts. I got to meet the grandmother of AI, this incredible woman, Dr. Fei Fei Li, who created ImageNet, and a bunch of other, actually largely female pioneers and experts. I lucked out that I got to have that already in my back pocket going into this, and Stella is different than Eve in that Stella is not a programmer. Her role is very different. It’s much more, I would say, business-minded, whereas Eve is much more of a creator and an inventor and a tinkerer.

The tech itself is interesting, but for me it’s always the people around it that [are] so much more interesting. I was so amazed and pleasantly surprised that, my biggest takeaway from meeting some of these people who work in AI was just asking them questions about their lives. “What do you think about? There are some women who were explaining, “Well, I’m literally obsessed with numbers. Like I take a shower, and I’m thinking about this formula and while looking for a date online.” I just found the living of it to be so informative, in terms of playing someone like Stella. She’s the human behind some of these elevated women and women in power. It’s endlessly fascinating. Like, “who’s actually there?”

DEADLINE: What is behind that look Stella shares with Cory at the end — it’s so loaded, and he did tell Celine about the affair, but does Stella know that? What do you see for Stella’s future in the show. Could she come back Season 5?

LEE: Stella and Cory. Billy’s so great. I think everyone would choose to have their own spin-off with Billy. Everyone loves Billy. He’s incredible on the show. And Cory is just an iconic character. Stella and Cory, I think, arguably, has been one of the most fascinating dynamics that we’ve ever seen in TV. The show is such a beast it has to service so many different people and so many characters, rightfully so. I do wish, and Billy and I have spoken at length about this over the years. There are all of these unwritten scenes that we’re imagining. That type of workplace marriage, I would say, it’s so fascinating to me, because it’s evolved so much. It was a clear mentor/mentorship kind of dynamic, into equals, into competitors, into straight-up rivals. By the end, they’ve been through so much, and it is devastating, because, like [with] Mia, there is a certain place where there is no coming back from certain betrayals. [Stella] knows, and she also knows that he had to do what he had to do. It’s like, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game. Game respects game.”

This moment is so loaded, and I love that they included that. If you looked at each millisecond of that exchange between the two of them, it says everything. More than maybe dialogue could. That being said, at this moment, I do think this is the end for Stella. I know it’s shocking, but I think that this is goodbye.

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