By her mid-20s, Jung Ho-yeon was a fixture in New York high fashion. She had walked exclusives for Louis Vuitton in Paris, shot Chanel campaigns lensed by Karl Lagerfeld himself and sat on Models.com's ranking of the world's top 50. It was, by any measure, a modeling career firing on all cylinders.
The paper version, as she tells it, was the problem. "People liked the shiny version of me, but I knew I was mostly made of other things," she said in a 2021 interview with W Korea. Worse, working overseas meant years of flying alone, eating alone and holing up in hotel rooms between shows, and the isolation wore on her. By 2018, she has said, she was anxious, on edge and increasingly unsure of who the person in the pictures actually was.
What filled those restless nights were movies, binge-watched obsessively. She burned through Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan and almost everything Frances McDormand ever starred in, with comfort rewatches of "Fargo" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" mixed in, until a thought crept up on her: Maybe she could act, too. "Movies were what consoled me back then," she told Harper's Bazaar in 2021. "I watched them like crazy in my room, and at some point I thought, I want to try expressing something that way myself."
The rest is history: one hail-mary audition, a Netflix breakout for the ages, global stardom almost overnight. Five years after "Squid Game" changed everything, Hoyeon (she goes by the single name abroad) arrives at her biggest test yet with a feature debut in "Hope," the long-awaited creature thriller from Na Hong-jin ("The Wailing"), which hits theaters Wednesday. How a runway It Girl ended up firing grenade launchers for Korea's most exacting director is quite a story — one that took the long way around.
The girl with the red hair
Born in Seoul in 1994, Hoyeon began taking modeling classes at 15 and was freelancing by 16, talking her way into Seoul Fashion Week shows for two years without an agency behind her. The wider public got to know her in 2013 on "Korea's Next Top Model," the local edition of Tyra Banks' reality franchise, where she finished as runner-up and rode the exposure into steady work on the domestic circuit.
In 2016, she packed for New York — partly ambition, and partly, by her own account, an escape. "I'd been running nonstop, and at some point I felt like a machine that just worked," she told W Korea. "Out of nowhere, the question hit me: Who am I? So I packed my bags. Part of it was career, but mostly I wanted to throw myself somewhere hard." Before the move, she dyed her hair a fiery shade of red on a whim. That red hair became her calling card; around the industry, designers came to know her simply as the red-haired Asian model.
The start was rocky — her first booking, an exclusive for Alexander Wang, fell through — but the climb afterward was steep. Louis Vuitton signed her as a Paris exclusive for its spring 2017 season, hand-picked by creative director Nicolas Ghesquiere, and the rest of the luxury circuit, from Chanel to Miu Miu, fell in line. By 2018 she had cracked Models.com's top-50 list; in time, she would become Vuitton's global ambassador and, in 2022, the first Korean to appear solo on the cover of American Vogue.
Learning to breathe
The pull toward acting grew stronger around 2018. At one point, Hoyeon told her agency she was taking a month off, then spent it taking English classes so she could follow the films she loved without leaning on subtitles. And whenever work brought her back to Korea over the holidays, she quietly booked private acting lessons, piling up some three months' worth in all. In January 2020, she signed with a Korean acting agency, figuring the company would train her for a while before putting her up for anything. Instead, within weeks, she was asked to tape a "Squid Game" audition "as soon as possible" — while in New York for fashion week. She barely slept for three days, filming the three scenes she'd been given with nothing else to go on.
Director Hwang Dong-hyuk liked the tape enough to ask to see her in person; she flew home, and the part was hers almost on the spot. Then the terror kicked in — surrounded by a cast of seasoned pros like Lee Jung-jae and Park Hae-soo, Hoyeon felt so out of her depth early in the shoot that she asked the director point-blank whether she was doing all right. "You're doing fine," she recalled Hwang saying. "You're already enough. Sae-byeok is you." Everything, she said, got easier from there.
As Sae-byeok, the flinty North Korean defector gambling her life for her little brother, Jung became the most talked-about face of the most-watched show in Netflix history. That role won her a SAG Award — a first for a Korean actress — plus an Emmy nomination, all on her very first acting job. Doors opened fast. She signed with CAA in late 2021 and, the following year, shot a small supporting turn in Alfonso Cuaron's Apple TV+ miniseries "Disclaimer," which premiered in 2024 with Cate Blanchett in the lead.
Enter the monster
"Hope" found her through Hwang Jung-min, the veteran star who plays the film's beleaguered police chief and recommended her to Na. The director — whose 2016 demon-possession thriller "The Wailing" made him a household name — invited her to a meeting, bought her jjajangmyeon and, by the end of lunch, put the script in her hands. "I so badly wanted 'Hope' to be mine," she told reporters in Seoul earlier this month. "I honestly never expected to be handed the script. Director Na was someone I'd been dying to work with. I felt like I could fly."
Na's first film in a decade drops a mysterious beast on Hopo, a sleepy harbor town near the DMZ, and watches the place erupt into all-out carnage. Jung plays Sung-ae, a rookie cop who comes screeching into the mayhem armed with heavy weaponry and keeps hurling herself between the creature and everything it wants to destroy. Getting there took roughly six months of prep. She put on four kilograms of muscle to manage a rifle that weighs five, ran through firearms drills, learned how to drive stick shift and worked with a racing pro on drift techniques, all so she could handle most of the action herself.
Her stint under Cuaron, who once pushed her first scene past 30 takes over two days, turned out to be the perfect warm-up for Na's notoriously relentless methods. "Director Na doesn't compromise, and for a rookie like me, that was nothing short of a blessing," Hoyeon said. "With every take, I could feel my acting getting better. Because he wouldn't settle, I was actually freer in front of the camera. What made the cut is that raw, worn-down version of me, and I think the director captured it beautifully." Beyond the live-wire action, her Sung-ae is where the movie keeps a semblance of humanity. With nearly everyone around her either hopelessly out of their depth or flat-out useless, her cool-headed cop — who also happens to be the lone woman in the ensemble — patches up the wounded between firefights and comes off as the closest thing "Hope" has to a decent human being, true to the title.
"The director told me later that when we first met, he saw in me the goodwill at Sung-ae's core," Hoyeon said of her character. "If someone called me a person of that kind of goodwill, I'd probably go, 'Who, me?' But the perseverance, the refusal to quit — that part I think we genuinely shared."
What's next
Two more films are in post-production, including the thriller "The Hole." Hoyeon has said she wants to try theater one day, scary as she finds the thought of carrying a character onstage for a whole evening. Whatever comes next, for now she's soaking it all in. Sixteen years after she first walked a runway for free, she's in no hurry, just moving forward. "You know that old song — 'Wouldn't it be great to see myself on TV'? That's exactly how this feels," she said. "Seeing my face on the big screen still doesn't feel real."
Source: The Korea Herald News