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There are moments lately when Hoyeon can see that things are changing, that life is hurtling off on a thrilling new vector—that it may never be the same. This was the feeling that crept in, for instance, when she checked on her steadily exploding Instagram account to realize she had gained nearly 15 million followers in the preceding three weeks. At that precise moment, in the fall of 2021, Netflix’s Squid Game was well on its way to becoming the streamer’s most watched series ever. And Hoyeon, the Korean show’s breakout star—who then went by Jung Ho-yeon—was undergoing the kind of transformative rush of instant fame that could only happen at this strange point in history. Before she landed Squid Game, the young model had never acted. Suddenly, she was a global megastar.
That sensation of change underfoot came again last summer, when she arrived at the North London set where the director Alfonso Cuarón was shooting Disclaimer, his forthcoming Apple TV+ series starring Cate Blanchett. Hoyeon had been cast in a crucial supporting role and would be shooting her first-ever scenes in English, a language she was still mastering. There was a lot to take in. They were shooting on a gargantuan soundstage with a hive of crew members bustling in every direction. All around her was intimidating evidence that she was now swimming in different waters, career-wise. But the thing that stood out to Hoyeon—that made her feel she’d taken a serious leap forward—was parked outside. “The trailers,” she tells me. “In Korea, we don’t have trailers. But in England and America, you guys have this kind of amazing system that gives actors more personal space to prepare.”
For Hoyeon, personal space has come at a near-prohibitive premium since Squid Game dropped. In the disorienting early days when the show was still becoming a cultural phenomenon—it would generate more than 1.65 billion hours’ worth of viewing time in its first 28 days—dozens of scripts began piling up on her doorstep, and a gaggle of high-powered Hollywood agents clashed for the chance to sign her as a client. Then came the hardware: She won a Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding actress in a drama series, becoming the first actress in a non-English-language TV show to take home the trophy. From there came a deluge of demands on her time, along with mobs of fans all around the world scrutinizing her every move. So, yeah, a quiet trailer to use between takes is a luxury worth noticing.
In her infrequent moments of solitude, Hoyeon has had plenty to think about. Like: What kind of career does she want to have? What kind of star does she want to be? Should she stay in her native South Korea, the sudden pop-cultural epicenter where she made her name? Or head west to chase her dreams in Hollywood? Choice can feel like a burden when it seems that every opportunity you can imagine is suddenly available all at once. At 28, Hoyeon feels the weight of expectation, but maybe more than that, she says she’s energized by the possibilities of the moment. “I feel pressure about that,” she says. “But for a Korean to have this much opportunity in [Western] society is a very rare thing to happen. I don’t want to waste that.”
When we meet for lunch on a recent Sunday in West Hollywood, Hoyeon and I are joined by an interpreter who will remain mostly a passive observer: Hoyeon’s English has been improving at a rapid clip, thanks to private lessons and her time spent making Disclaimer. She apologizes if she seems at all tired. She’s jet-lagged, she tells me. Before landing in LA three days ago, she was in New York shooting a fashion campaign, and before that she was in Seoul, where she was born and raised and now—kinda, sorta—lives again. “It’s hard to tell where my base is,” she says with a sigh.
It’s been that way for a long time. Hoyeon took up modeling at 16, and continued long after her parents pleaded with her to become a pharmacist. A succession of adults in her life—aunts, uncles, family friends—had been insisting that her lithe five-foot-nine frame was built for the fashion world, and Hoyeon, motivated by a hypercompetitive spirit and a desire for financial freedom, took to the job with preternatural ease. In the years that followed, she rocketed around the globe: She lived in New York for a time in her early 20s, and she walked the runways in London, Paris, Milan.
Over the past 18 months, her schedule has become even more intense. She spent a lot of time in LA last year, of course, contending for honors at the Emmys, the Globes, and a glut of other major ceremonies while plotting the next moves in her acting career. Not surprisingly, Hoyeon’s success in this new line of work has redoubled demand for her services in her previous occupation. She’s now a global ambassador for Louis Vuitton, Adidas, and Lancôme. The professional obligations can seem dizzying.
It feels noteworthy, then, that Hoyeon signed a lease on a new apartment last October in Seoul, the city she has reclaimed, for now, as a home base. For a long time, the South Korean capital felt like a place she needed to leave to fulfill her potential. Now, it’s a refuge. She recently spent a whole month there, her first real vacation since Squid Game premiered, a blissful stretch of doing…not much at all. She’d sleep late. Go to Pilates. Watch TV while slurping down Cup Noodles. “I was very healthy,” she tells me.
Other than the Cup Noodles, I point out.
“Cup Noodles makes you healthy!” She clarifies: “Mentally!”
The time by herself was a helpful period of boundary-setting. “I’ve always had a problem saying no,” she says, noting that this challenge was heightened in the aftermath of her Squid Game breakout. “Last year was the most glorious year of my life. At the same time, physically and mentally, it was the hardest time of my life.”
In addition to her tornado of professional commitments, her phone was suddenly clogged with hundreds of texts and DMs from people she knew, or at least peripherally knew, all wanting to take her out for dinner, or a drink, or anything to celebrate her success. “At the beginning I was like, Yeah, I should meet them. They’re trying to congratulate me, so I should be grateful for them. I just thought, If I say no, is this person going to be hurt? Are they going to feel bad? Will they think I’m not a good person? Will they think that I’m changing?”
She says she’s trying now to balance the responsibility she feels to make smart choices with the duty she also feels to make others happy. It’s a tension she’s dealt with her whole life, practicing filial piety and deference to others. “In Korean society,” Hoyeon explains, “younger people always have to be polite. They’re in a weaker position. When I started [modeling], everyone was always older than me, and I was always seeking love from the older people on set. And that kind of personality, I think, is still in me.”
All those empty hours that surrounded Hoyeon’s work as a model—the interminable flights, the lonely nights on the road, the long stretches at home waiting for her next booking—afforded her the opportunity to become an inadvertent cinephile. “I had lots of time back then, so I just watched everything,” she says. Fargo became one of her all-time favorites, as did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Children of Men. She binged Marvel movies, animated movies, comedies, sci-fi. “I didn’t have, like, a specific taste,” she says, shrugging. “I still don’t.”
After years spent mainlining films, Hoyeon began to think that acting might offer a way to explore and articulate the feelings that were forever swirling, roiling, churning inside of her. “Acting felt like a perfect job,” she says. “I had all these emotions I thought I wasn’t supposed to express. But in acting, you can express all kinds of things. I wanted to express my stress, my anger, my sadness. I think I see acting almost like a form of mental therapy.”
She signed up for a few acting lessons and, when her contract with her Korean modeling agency expired in January 2020, she took a chance and signed on with an acting agency in Seoul. Just two weeks later, her agent secured Hoyeon her first audition. It was for a new show Netflix was developing called Squid Game.
The thing is, as far as Squid Game is concerned, you can’t really trust Hoyeon’s version of events. Even now, after all the golden statuettes and the critical acclaim and the adoring YouTube fan edits set to that one truly terrible Chainsmokers song, she’ll look you dead in the eye and tell you how bad she thinks her performance was. How embarrassed she still is to watch herself onscreen. How she once texted Hwang Dong-hyuk—the show’s creator, writer, and director—to say “I’m so sorry,” after Squid Game first began streaming.
Her collaborators tell a different story. Director Hwang, as he’s known to his crew, cast Hoyeon as Kang Sae-byeok—a streetwise North Korean defector putting her life on the line to reunite her family and arguably the most critical of the show’s three leads—largely on the strength of her audition tape. She’d painstakingly filmed it in her New York apartment over the course of three days. “She was like a jaguar in the Amazon,” Hwang tells me via email. “When we met in person, I was fully convinced she was perfect for the role of Sae-byeok. Her fighter-like aura that she carries with her whole body, the slightly gender-neutral voice, and her eyes that seemed like she wasn’t showing all of her emotions—that was exactly what I was looking for.”
Not long into production, he realized he was witnessing the emergence of someone transcendent. They were filming the Red Light, Green Light game from the pilot, in which hundreds of contestants are shockingly gunned down and the sinister nature of the entire contest at the heart of the series is revealed. “Working alongside so many actors in a set of such scale was a tough task for an inexperienced actor,” Hwang recounts. “I still remember this particular cut where you see Hoyeon look up at the sky at the end of the game as a roof closes over the arena. I was mesmerized by her in that scene. It was so fresh, you’d never seen anything like it, and her face just completely pulled you in.”
Hwang was watching the action on a monitor, standing next to Lee Jung-jae, another of the series’ stars, who shared Hwang’s conviction that they were seeing something special. “She was just Sae-byeok from the start,” Lee tells me in an email.
Which makes sense, given the lengths to which Hoyeon went to ready herself for the role. She spent time with real North Korean defectors to dial in Sae-byeok’s accent, trained in martial arts to nail the physicality of the role, and kept a daily diary in character. “When [Sae-byeok] talks about her father’s death,” Hoyeon recalls, “I wrote notes from her perspective: What was the building like? What did it smell like? What were the sounds of the gunshots?” But most of all, Hoyeon zeroed in on the emotions she and Sae-byeok shared. “She’s isolated,” Hoyeon says. “At the time, I lived in New York, where I wasn’t born and raised, and she was in South Korea, where she wasn’t born and raised. That makes her kind of lonely, and triggers her self-defense mechanisms—she’s not as trustful of the people around her, and has a really good ability to read the room.”
Cate Blanchett noticed that same attention to detail on the set of Disclaimer but also noted Hoyeon’s veteran-like willingness to toss all that prep out the window and start over from scratch. “She came so prepared and had this fully realized character as Alfonso had described it on the page,” Blanchett tells me. “But then, as often is the way with writer-directors, he’d written it one way and then had another perspective and take on the character in mind. And watching her deal with those shifts and changes that he wanted from the character, watching her totally pivot in her perception of the character whilst sort of incorporating all of the ideas that she brought to it, was mind-blowing. I would’ve thought that she’d been acting since she was 12. She is 12, right?”
Sae-byeok’s character arc serves as Squid Game’s emotional core, elevating the show beyond a loose assemblage of shocking twists and ultraviolent action sequences into a sublime work of art. And it’s Hoyeon’s measured, penetrating performance that imbues that journey with a soul. It’s not a stretch to suggest that without Hoyeon’s Sae-byeok, Squid Game might never have had the juice to become a global phenomenon in the first place.
As proud as she is of the series, though, Hoyeon still manages to find a way to be critical of herself, telling me she wishes she could have exerted more command of her emotions. “The body is like a machine,” she says. “We’re like robots—we can control. These days, I’m trying to find that control.”
Eventually, I have to ask her: Is she always so hard on herself because she really means it, or does she need the self-deprecation to keep herself hungry and striving?
“In Korea, we have a saying: As rice ripens, it bows its head,” she says. “It means that [even as you succeed,] you really have to continue to stay humble. There is a part of me that continues to lean into that self-deprecation because I know that that’s how I’m going to get better and push myself forward to grow. On the other hand, as an actor, it’s really tough to measure how good or talented you are at acting, because our job is about portraying someone else’s life and making it your own and making it seem convincing. I don’t think there will ever be a point where I’m able to do that perfectly, and there’s a sense of insecurity I carry because I’ll never be able to say I fully understand a particular character. But that is why I’m drawn to acting.”
After lunch, we drive to a flea market in a high school parking lot a few minutes away. Hoyeon doesn’t shop for clothes much these days, but her stylist told her about this market ages ago and she’s been wanting to check it out.
We wind our way through dusty stalls stocked with old Star Wars toys and shredded jean jackets until we happen upon a lady sitting behind a tiny metal desk with a neon green typewriter on it. Her name is Lily, she explains, and she’ll write us a poem on the spot about anything we ask for.
“Let’s do it,” Hoyeon says.
Lily turns to Hoyeon and asks, “Do you have a topic in mind?”
Without hesitation, Hoyeon responds, asking Lily how long her pet cat will live.
“How long your cat’s going to live?” Lily echoes, a little taken aback. Then she smiles. “I like this prompt.” She thinks for a moment, nods, and begins to type. After a couple of minutes, she hands Hoyeon a small note card that reads:
sometimes,
when nights are sad,
i think about how old my cat will be
when it dies.
maybe 8, 11, 23?
i have come to the conclusion
that the age does not matter
because no matter what
i will be devastated,
and my cat will have no idea.
There are tears welling in Hoyeon’s eyes, visible just along the edges of her slender black sunglasses. She thanks Lily sincerely, places the poem in her pocket, and we wander off. The crying is new for her, she tells me. “Normally I don’t go too up or down. I can control my emotions.” Growing up in Korea, she says, “I got used to hiding things, hiding what I feel, hiding what I think. But that led me to have this kind of personality where I smooth over my moods.” Throughout the past year, though, she’s found emotions taking hold in new ways. She’s cried while doing interviews, while alone in her hotel room, while on the phone with friends. “All the changes,” she says, “I think it was overwhelming.”
Which is why her two cats—and their time upon this mortal plane—are top of mind. Her boyfriend, the Korean actor Lee Dong-hwi, rescued the first, aptly named Sae-byeok, while she was making Squid Game in 2020. They adopted the second, Mora, a year later. “I was never the type of person who was dependent on others,” she says. “But in the last year, I’ve come to appreciate more the things that are precious in my life.” What she loves about her cats most, it seems, is that they never really ask much of her at all. “The sheer fact that they are there,” she says, “they spend their time with me, and they’re always by my side—I’m just so grateful for that.”
Within weeks of Squid Game hitting Netflix in September 2021, the scripts began pouring into Hoyeon’s inbox the way the rest of us get Banana Republic discount codes. In the 10-month gap between wrapping Squid Game and its premiere, Hoyeon had done a handful of auditions in Korea and, in her telling, “failed” them all. Now, all of a sudden, she was landing full-blown offers for big parts at home and abroad.
“I was very confused,” she admits. “I read so many scripts and met with directors. But I felt like I didn’t have any kind of standard to choose things, like which roles were good for me or which characters were interesting. Everything was interesting.” To simplify the process, she went after the only two projects that required her to audition—if she landed them, she wanted to feel like she earned them. She won both: first the spot in Disclaimer, and then a role in The Governesses, an A24 feature costarring Lily-Rose Depp that’s still in development.
The fact that both those projects are in English is also by design. “I love challenging myself,” Hoyeon says. “And trying to speak English well and act well at the same time was very challenging—maybe too challenging. But I have this desire to put myself on the edge.” She sees the effort as an investment in her future: “I’m working to improve myself so that, maybe when I’m 40 or 50, I’ll speak more fluent English and have more opportunities available to me.”
To hear Cate Blanchett tell it, Hoyeon won’t need to wait quite that long for those doors to open. “I mean, if you’d asked me to go to Korea,” Blanchett says, “having never acted before in something in Korean, I would not have had that level of composure. You fall in love with her as a human being, but then she’s so magnetic as a performer. She has access to this sort of ferocity, both kind of a physical and psychological ferocity, yet she has this incredible sweetness and curiosity about her. I was absolutely blown out of the water by it.”
The city of Seoul is riddled with mountains—craggy, tree-covered masses that interrupt the sprawl like meatballs on a bed of spaghetti. Growing up, Hoyeon despised them. “My dad had his own climbing club, and he’d always force my sisters and I to climb the mountains with him,” she recalls. “He would wake us so early in the morning to get there before the crowds, and I just hated that.”
Lately, though, she’s had a change in perspective. The apartment she moved into—quiet and secluded, hidden toward the back of a massive complex—features a startling panorama of one of the city’s smaller peaks. The mountains have become “one of the reasons I love Seoul so much,” she says. “I’ve really grown to cherish the energy you get from being in nature. My place is a little further away from the bustle of the city, which I really love. It’s a place where I can find my mental peace.”
For most of 2022, Hoyeon was certain she’d settle down in Los Angeles, convinced it was the right place—the only place—for her career to progress. She’s realizing now, though, that she had some outdated ideas in mind, especially when it comes to where and how movies are now made. “I feel like before there existed this particular idea of the only American dream, so to speak,” she says. “But now, we live in an era where a good story will do great anywhere, wherever it’s made—and I feel very lucky to be living in such times.”
Hoyeon is discovering that new options abound. She can live in Seoul and still act in Hollywood. She can do TV shows in English and still make films in Korean. She can become an A-list movie star and still remain a world-class model—the latter of which, she says, has “become fun again.”
“The boundaries are crumbling,” she says. “They’re disappearing. And the more I think about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to just blaze my own trail. As the actress that I am right now—coming from Korea, with my current English skills—I want to play the roles that I can under those conditions. I want to see what’s possible for me. That’s my path, and it’s something that I have to create for myself.”
More and more, she’s excited by the idea of staying in South Korea and reveling in its golden age of auteurs—like Parasite’s Bong Joon-ho, Burning’s Lee Chang-dong, and Decision to Leave’s Park Chan-wook, to name but a tiny fraction. In late March, in fact, news broke of Hoyeon’s newest project: She’ll be making her feature film debut in Hope, a thriller from the Korean director Na Hong-jin, with production slated to begin later this year. “Squid Game showed me that even if I do films or TV shows in Korean,” Hoyeon says, “as long as they’re good, they can be global.”
Now more than ever, Hoyeon is living on precisely her own terms. She’s chasing the things that make her—not her colleagues, not her fans, not her loved ones—really, truly, happy, and she’s no longer concerned about where or what she’s supposed to be.
“Someone once told me that acting is a lot like life,” Hoyeon says. “You will never feel complete, but it’s a constant and unending struggle to be complete. I think that right now I’m just trying my best to run toward that goal, even though I know that I won’t ever reach perfection.”
Yang-Yi Goh is GQ’s style editor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April/May 2023 issue of GQ with the title “Hoyeon Rising”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Elizaveta Porodina
Styled by Dena Giannini
Hair by Tiago Goya using Oribe
Makeup by Holly Silius for Lancôme
Manicure by Yoko Sakakura for A-Frame Agency
Tailoring by Zoya Milentyeva
Set design by Nick Des Jardins at Streeters
Produced by Alicia Zumback & Patrick Mapel at Camp Productions