Titi Lee, a non-binary first-generation Taiwanese American comedian and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, is currently appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival performing their one-person show, Good Girl Gone Baddie.
Titi Lee has appeared on popular TV shows including HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm and the latest season of Netflix’s Girls5Eva. They play Belle in the feature film The Civil Dead, a Slamdance darling from fellow comedians Whitmer Thomas and Clay Tatum. Lee co-wrote and starred in the comedic short film I THINK SHE LIKES YOU I, about a threesome gone wrong, which played at The Tribeca Fest and Outfest.org, a leading LGBTQIA+ arts and entertainment organization “empowering storytellers to transform the world.”
Their approach to storytelling is highly interdisciplinary, blending traditional forms and new media to give a voice to unique perspectives and subcultures in innovating and daring ways.
Titi Lee.
Edited for Style and Context
What is Good Girl Gone Baddie about? Good Girl Gone Baddie is my first solo show and I’m so excited to be doing it at the biggest fringe festival in the world. I’m a standup but the show is categorized as a solo show because it’s got more elements than just standup. I use mediums like dance, song, and drag to tell the story. It’s a bit like if Ali Wong and BTS had a gay theater kid… that’d be my show.
It’s been a whirlwind of emotions – not unlike making a short film! But instead of wrapping filming in a few days, you are in this Groundhog Day loop of re-shoots everyday… because every time you do the show, you decompress, see other shows, go flyer, go network, etcetera and then go to sleep and wake up and do it all over again. In many ways it’s more difficult to me than any shoot I’ve ever had to do… because you’re not just performing, but you’re producing, marketing, networking, and all around being your own support system throughout the entire month.
What’s next for you?I’m performing at the Hollywood Fringe showcase at Edinburgh Fringe tomorrow, and from coming here I’ve met other festival directors such as Adelaide, and I would love to take Good Girl Gone Baddie on the road to other theaters and share it with more of the international community.
Titi Lee: Tribeca Film Fest Premier
I Think She Likes You – Short Film Trailer from Titi Lee on Vimeo.
What is I THINK SHE LIKES YOU, which premiered in the recent Tribeca Film Festival, about? The film is, on the surface, about a threesome gone wrong. We wanted to flip the expectations of what Hollywood shows threesomes to be like on its head, to show a more realistic one – an emotional threesome, if you will. It’s about two women who care about each other but ultimately their own patterns get in the way of their relationship, and they’re stuck in this cyclical loop – and the man they bring home is caught in there with them.
What did you want potential audiences to get out of the movie? We hope they have a good time! Other than thinking “Thank goodness I’m not in a relationship like this” or “Oh my god, this is me, I’m definitely [insert which character you identify with]”, we also want them to see a bisexual relationship on screen in more than just a sexual sense.
Titi Lee.
Why did you make the short? Christine and I are both standup comedians that met at a comedy festival back in 2018, and got along because we both shared similar experiences being bisexual women at the time that had recently come out. We started sharing our experiences and found we had similar stories from messy relationships and wanted to write a short that put a bisexual relationship between two female presenting people at the front row center of it.
What were your biggest learning curves on this project? We self-funded, self-produced, and put together the team on a rag-tag budget. We made the whole thing for under $5000, which honestly still feels insane to me now. I fortunately had a lot of experience producing from working at Cracked as a comedy producer for years, and knew the lay of the land very well in terms of working on limited resources. I got Subway to donate sandwiches for crafty, I got a bar to let us film for free, and worked with friends I trusted and knew well. Everyone got paid, but it was definitely a doing-it-for-the-love type of project.
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