Jung Ho-yeon, known globally as Hoyeon, makes her feature-film debut Wednesday in Na Hong-jin's creature thriller “Hope.” The supermodel-turned-actress spent six months preparing for the role, trading runways for firearms drills and intensive stunt work. Here is a look at the key facts and the long journey behind that moment.
Key facts
- Hoyeon debuts on the big screen in “Hope,” directed by Na Hong-jin of “The Wailing.”
- She plays Sung-ae, a rookie cop who battles a mysterious beast in a harbor town near the DMZ.
- The role required six months of training, four kilograms of added muscle, and practice with a five-kilogram rifle.
- “Squid Game” made Hoyeon a global star, earning her a SAG Award and an Emmy nomination for her first acting role.
Hoyeon's path from high fashion to high-stakes action was not a straight line. It was shaped by loneliness, late-night movie marathons, and a single audition tape that changed everything.
From Seoul to New York runways
Born in Seoul in 1994, Hoyeon started taking modeling classes at 15 and was freelancing by 16. She talked her way into Seoul Fashion Week shows for two years without an agency behind her. The wider public got to know her in 2013 as the runner-up on “Korea's Next Top Model,” the local edition of Tyra Banks' reality franchise.
In 2016, she packed for New York. It was 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 later said. “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 moving, she dyed her hair a fiery shade of red on a whim. That red hair became her calling card; designers came to know her simply as the red-haired Asian model.
The start was rocky. Her first major 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 Ghesquière, and the rest of the luxury circuit, from Chanel to Miu Miu, followed. By 2018 she had cracked Models.com's top-50 list. In time, she would become Louis Vuitton's global ambassador and, in 2022, the first Korean woman to appear solo on the cover of American Vogue.
Movies as a lifeline
The more Hoyeon succeeded abroad, the more isolated she felt. Working overseas meant years of flying alone, eating alone, and holing up in hotel rooms between shows. She has said the anxiety wore on her until she was on edge and increasingly unsure of who the person in the pictures actually was.
Movies filled those restless nights. She binge-watched Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, and almost everything Frances McDormand ever starred in. She returned to “Fargo” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” for comfort. “Movies were what consoled me back then,” she said 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.”
Around 2018, the pull toward acting grew stronger. She told her agency she was taking a month off, then spent it taking English classes so she could follow films without leaning on subtitles. Whenever work brought her back to Korea over the holidays, she quietly booked private acting lessons, piling up about three months' worth in all.
In January 2020, she signed with a Korean acting agency. She expected the company to train her for a while before putting her up for anything. Instead, within weeks, she was asked to tape a “Squid Game” audition while still in New York for fashion week. She barely slept for three days, filming the three scenes she had been given with nothing else to go on.
The 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. The role was Sae-byeok, a North Korean defector gambling her life for her little brother. It was her first acting job, and she found herself surrounded by seasoned pros like Lee Jung-jae and Park Hae-soo. Early in the shoot, she asked the director point-blank whether she was doing all right. His answer, as she recalled: “You're doing fine. You're already enough. Sae-byeok is you.”
The Squid Game explosion
“Squid Game” became the most-watched show in Netflix history. Hoyeon became the most talked-about face of the series and a global star almost overnight. The role earned her a Screen Actors Guild Award, the first for a Korean actress, and an Emmy nomination.
Doors opened quickly. She signed with CAA in late 2021 and, the following year, shot a supporting role in Alfonso Cuarón's Apple TV+ miniseries “Disclaimer,” which premiered in 2024 with Cate Blanchett in the lead. It was a demanding set: Cuarón pushed her first scene past 30 takes over two days. That experience, she later said, prepared her for Na Hong-jin's famously relentless methods.
Enter the monster
“Hope” came to Hoyeon through veteran actor Hwang Jung-min, who plays the film's embattled 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 handed her the script by the end of lunch.
“I so badly wanted 'Hope' to be mine,” she told reporters 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. She is also the only woman in the main ensemble, and she spends much of the film patching up the wounded between firefights—the closest thing “Hope” has to a decent human being, true to the title.
To become Sung-ae, Hoyeon trained for about six months. She gained four kilograms of muscle so she could manage a rifle that weighs five kilograms. She ran firearms drills, learned how to drive a manual transmission, and worked with a racing professional on drift techniques, all so she could handle most of the action herself.
On Na's set, there was no room for shortcuts. “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.”
She also found a personal connection to the character. Na told her later that when they first met, he saw in her the goodwill at Sung-ae's core. Hoyeon laughed at the description. “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 comes next
There is already more on the horizon. Two films are in post-production, including the thriller “The Hole.” Hoyeon has also said she wants to try theater someday, despite the fear of carrying a character onstage for a whole evening. For now, she is 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