In an interview on 2 June 2023 on NPR with Ailsa Chang, Greta Lee indicated that she found it amusing that when she told her family and friends that she was taking this role, many of them were surprised and wondered if she could even speak Korean.
In a profile of Greta Lee in the New York Times on 30 May 2023, writer/director Celine Song indicated she tried to keep Lee and Teo Yoo separated as much as possible to help the scenes when their two characters finally meet in person after a long separation.
Despite his character's thick accent and broken English, Teo Yoo, who portrays Hae Sung, actually speaks very fluent English along with three other languages.
In a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Celine Song spoke about the real-life event that inspired the film: "There's a bar in the East Village that I ended up in because I was living around there. And I was sitting there with my childhood sweetheart who flew in from Korea, now he is a friend, who only really speaks Korean, and my American husband who only really speaks English. And I was sitting there trying to translate these two guys trying to communicate, and I felt like something really special was going on. I was sort of becoming a bridge or a portal between these two men and also, in some ways, these two worlds of language and culture. Something about that moment really sparked something, and then it made me really feel like maybe this could be a movie. So it started from a pretty real thing that happened to me. But then, of course, in making the movie, it comes from a subjective experience that sparks this whole story into an object, which is a script, and then from there, the movie."