Lisa at 29 has almost everything a pop star can win. Then, in her new documentary, she admitted the one thing she is not sure fame will let her have: a wedding.
In Always Lalisa, the feature documentary that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11 and opened in limited theaters on October 12, director Sue Kim slowly leads Lisa Manobal to the most personal subject of her life. Lisa says she wants to get married and have children. She says her father is sick, and that she wants him to walk her down the aisle. And then she says the quiet part: she is worried her fans will not be happy if it happens.
Kim chose to leave the moment unresolved, and Lisa has not tried to resolve it either. Asked about the scene, she said she hopes fans understand her more, adding that she is just a girl who wants the same things anyone wants at the end of the day.
It is a startling confession from the most-followed K-pop soloist on the planet, and it lands differently when you remember how far she traveled to get here. Lisa was born Pranpriya Manobal on March 27, 1997, in Buriram, in Thailand’s northeast. In 2010 she walked into a YG Entertainment audition in Thailand and became the only applicant accepted, moving alone to South Korea at 14 without speaking Korean. She trained for more than five years before debuting with BLACKPINK in August 2016, the group’s rapper and main dancer, and the first non-Korean artist YG ever launched.
BLACKPINK became one of the best-selling girl groups of all time, but Lisa’s solo numbers rewrote the record books on their own. Her 2021 single album Lalisa made her the first female artist to sell 736,000 copies in a week in South Korea, its video set a 24-hour YouTube record for a solo artist, and “Money” became the first song by a K-pop soloist to pass one billion streams on Spotify.
The year Always Lalisa follows is the year she stepped out of that system. In 2024 she founded her own company, Lloud, and signed with RCA Records. Her debut album Alter Ego arrived in 2025 and reached the top ten of the Billboard 200. She made her acting debut as Mook in the third season of The White Lotus, filmed in her home country. BLACKPINK reunited for the EP Deadline and another world tour, and this fall she performed her single “SaWaDiKa” at the MTV Video Music Awards, where she took home the Best Pop award.
The documentary exists because of that independence. Kim has said she knew from the start she was working with an idol outside the old K-pop system, which allowed an honesty the industry rarely permits. K-pop has historically held its stars to a near-impossible standard in their private lives, where dating news alone can become a scandal. Marriage and children sit at the very top of that list of forbidden subjects, which is exactly why Lisa’s fear is not vanity. It is a real calculation that women in her position have had to make for decades.
What she does with it is, for now, an open question, and the film is content to leave it open. Always Lalisa is in limited theatrical release now and is expected to stream on YouTube Premium later this year. Lisa, meanwhile, is back on the road and back in the studio, still 29, still collecting firsts. She has conquered countries, charts and one of television’s biggest shows. The only milestone she cannot schedule is the one most people take for granted, and for the first time, she has said so out loud.
Photo: 티비텐, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
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