hen Hoyeon Jung landed in America for the first time in nearly a year, she noticed that something in the air had changed. A kind of charge seemed to hover around the South Korean model turned actor, once known for her incandescent red hair, now famed for her role as a brooding North Korean defector in the Netflix hit Squid Game. She stepped briskly through the LAX terminal to the immigration desk where a delighted officer promptly asked for her autograph.
A few days later she sat down to breakfast at the Beverly Hills Hotel, ensconced in a striped banquette, casual in jeans and a blue Henley, dark hair hastily pulled into a low ponytail. No one paid her any mind—this was the Polo Lounge after all—but then, the maître d’ slid a frothy latte in front of her. Peering up from the cup was Kang Sae-byeok, her Squid Game character, realistically rendered in milk foam.
“Sae-byeok-y coffee, isn’t that crazy? My entire life changed in just one month,” she tells me days later, now in New York. As we talk she switches fluidly between Korean and English, which she speaks with a lovely lilt and cheerful affect. It’s hard to overstate the phenomenon of Squid Game—a dystopian survivalist series that overtook the culture last fall, watched by some 142 million households in its first four weeks. (It became Netflix’s most-viewed series of all time.) Among a cast of established South Korean stars, the 27-year-old quickly emerged as the breakout.
“My entire life changed in just one month,” says Hoyeon, 27, who burst onto the scene in Netflix’s dystopian series Squid Game. She wears a Miu Miu dress.
Overnight success isn’t new, but Hoyeon’s vertiginous climb feels of the moment. Within three weeks she watched her Instagram follower count rise from 400,000 to 15 million; as of this writing, she sits at a comfortable 23.8 million—the most-followed Korean actress in the world. And her name has earned 3.5 billion views on TikTok, in an endless stream of fan-made clips and memes. She describes visiting Los Angeles in a state of stunned amazement, lunching with a string of Hollywood agents desperate to court her, and rubbing elbows at a LACMA gala in a cascading Louis Vuitton gown with stars she was excited to meet, like Awkwafina and Lil Nas X.
It’s happy-making. She’s thrilled by it all—and thrilled to be back in New York, where she lived for almost four years as a model. When we meet in the lobby of the Soho Grand, she bounds down the stairs and wraps me in a hug. We talk about when we last saw each other. Was it Paris at the Jacquemus show in February 2019, when I was still an editor at Vogue and she walked the runway in a plunging lapis lazuli number? Or was it here in the city—which she left in a hurry for a Squid Game callback just as COVID descended in 2020? “I didn’t even have time to pack my things,” she remembers. “I had to leave my Balmuda oven and a brand-new naembi.” I tease her for lamenting the loss of a $5 aluminum pot—a world-class actor being sad about an unused naembi—and she laughs. “Oh, but I’ve only been world-class for a month,” she says. “Maybe after one year, it will change.”
It’s evening, about 7 p.m., and she’s wearing wide vintage jeans from Copenhagen and a long leather blazer, also secondhand from a flea market in Seoul, with black sneakers and a Louis Vuitton backpack. Her hair is tied in an unfussy half-knot, still tousled from the flight. Tomorrow she will present at the CFDA Fashion Awards; tonight we’re due uptown for dinner at Atoboy, the dernier cri of Korean American cooking, where we’ll be joined by her dear friend and stylist Aeri Yun. “Lately I haven’t had much time to eat or sleep, but you promised you’d buy me something delicious today,” she says, singsong.
I call a car, a jet-black Suburban that pulls up to the curb, and we roll the windows down, though it’s early November and brisk. As we start to catch up, the driver halts at a red light on Sixth Avenue, and horns sound off impatiently around us. The driver and I grimace, but Hoyeon gleefully throws her arms in the air, eager to embrace the chaos of her former home.
“This is New York!” she shouts, smiling through her face mask. “I love it so much. Really. So much.”
The second of three daughters, Hoyeon was born in Seoul and raised on the outskirts, in the hamlet of Myeonmok-dong, in a household of women. For the last decade, her father has run a 24-hour roadside diner called Oori Nara, or Our Country (typically searched on Naver, South Korea’s Google, as “Squid Game Hoyeon’s family restaurant”). He serves steaming mounds of rice and bone-broth stews swimming with rings of green onion and flakes of gochugaru, a spice that she loves. It’s from him that Hoyeon inherited her own love of cooking, carefully re-creating her favorite family dishes as though casting a line toward home.
“We were drawn to her energy,” says designer Nicolas Ghesquière, who tapped Hoyeon for a Louis Vuitton show in 2016. “We all fell in love with her.” Louis Vuitton cape and dress with embroidered sequins.
Always independent, Hoyeon grew up a self-described “tomboy” who adored exploring the mountains and valleys and streams to the east of Seoul. She still prefers to drive in that direction, away from the glimmering capital, to the coastal town of Gangneung, surrounded by towering pines, which she affectionately refers to as soondubu, or soft tofu, heaven. “Cute places are great, but you can see them in any city,” she says. “Personally, I like to go a little more traditional and grungy—where the food is so delicious.”
As a girl, she “didn’t have any interest in modeling or fashion,” she confesses. “But I was tall”—she’s five foot nine—“and people on the street would tell me to be a model, so I thought, Why not try it? I’ve always been ambitious. I liked the challenge and kept wanting to go to the next level.” Still living at home, she took herself to castings before signing with a leading Seoul agency and landing on Korea’s Next Top Model, at age 19—a program that launched the country’s most-famous faces. She placed second, which was a kind of baptism by fire. “I searched my name every day, and I read all the comments, one by one,” she says, a bit sheepish. “Even if eight people loved me and only two people hated me, I always cried, at home alone.” The criticism felt personal; it still does. “Even now, I struggle with low self-esteem.”
Nevertheless, she found the tenacity to press on and rose through the ranks, becoming a favorite of Korean editors. I first met Hoyeon six years ago on an abandoned Seoul rooftop in the industrial neighborhood of Euljiro, where a local fashion show was taking place. She had a powerful walk and features so impossibly fine that I was reminded of a baby bird. We sat down for a coffee that week, and I remember that she wore black Lemaire pants that accentuated her long legs and a striped robe coat cinched tightly around her waist. She had a lively and frank way of speaking, always laughing and gesturing with her hands, and an infectious smile.
Left: “It was so chaotic,” Hoyeon says of the weeks following Squid Game’s release. “I didn’t believe it. I didn’t trust it.”Stella McCartney bodysuit. Alexander McQueen earrings and choker. Right: Acne Studios jacket. Givenchy skirt. Loewe shoe.
Only six months later she would sign with New York modeling agency The Society, dye her hair the brilliant shade of vermilion that would become her signature, and move into a Koreatown studio on 34th Street that she kept spotlessly clean. It was her first time living away from home. “I paid $1,500 a month for this tiny space,” she recalls. “The sun never came in and there was no closet, so I kept my clothes on a rack.”
But the city suited her. It was here that she began to find peace with the imperfections that had been picked apart by the public. “Growing up, I thought I had so many shortcomings, and I always thought that I had to fix them,” she says. “New York was the first place that told me that they were okay. I remember being so moved.”
It was during her first Fashion Week in Paris, in 2016, that she caught the eye of Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton artistic director of women’s collections. “I remember the first thing that struck me was her smile,” he tells me over the phone from L.A. “I remember she had flamboyant red hair, of course a gorgeous silhouette, and such an elegant way of moving. Off of the walk, we already knew she was in—as we say.”
Ghesquière held her as an exclusive, which meant Hoyeon spent 10 days anxiously pacing the Place Vendôme, unsure if the fittings would amount to anything, until the day she stepped down the brutalist halls of the then unfinished Rue Saint-Honoré flagship in a liquid black leather dress and became, in that moment, one of her country’s top models. She was 22 and would go on to shoot with Juergen Teller and Tim Walker and campaigns for Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, and Chanel.
“We were drawn to her energy, her professionalism, and, of course her personality,” Ghesquière says. “Hoyeon was so very special. She was super generous and friendly. We all fell in love with her.”
Hoyeon grew up a self-described “tomboy” who loved exploring the outdoors. Louis Vuitton cape and dress.
Atoboy is filled with a young crowd, half Korean and half not, who have made reservations weeks in advance, and their post-work chatter creates a pleasant din. The co-owner, Ellia Park, a 30-something entrepreneur who came from Korea and opened Atoboy in 2016 with her chef-husband, Junghyun Park, escorts us to the back and leaves three empty tables to form a barricade.
Without a stitch of makeup, Hoyeon’s skin gleams like the inside of an abalone shell. Only the shadows beneath her eyes suggest how little she has slept the past month. “This is the first time I’ve been able to rest since the show came out. But you know,” she says with a coy smile, “I’ve never been the resting type.” The kitchen sends a passel of dishes—the first a soupçon of smoky tofu mousse between two crisp squares of seaweed. Hoyeon pops one in her mouth, chasing it with a sip of a dry sparkling Riesling from the Finger Lakes.
The last time she walked a runway was December 2019 at Moschino’s MTA subway–set show. It’s a bittersweet memory, as she’d begun to see her career crest and fall, as so many models do. There were fewer castings, fewer callbacks, fewer shows. “That was the most painful thing,” she remembers. “When I started modeling overseas, I did well from the get-go, didn’t I? But as time went on, I had fewer and fewer jobs; the brands I had been working with didn’t want me anymore. I had so many worries because of it. Who am I? I worried about that so much.”
She spent her free time with Aeri and Aeri’s son, Phillip, now eight, who became her close friends and surrogate family. They had rescued her from her sunless K-town studio and placed her in an airy apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, next to their own home. Hoyeon would pick up Phillip from school, walking alongside him on his scooter, and read books to him out loud until he fell asleep. Without work to distract her, she studied whatever she could, taking classes at studios in New York, or Seoul, which she visited on rare occasion. “English, martial arts, yoga, acting,” she ticks them off on her fingers. “In my free time I’m always taking classes.”
On the road, she restlessly awaited her next job. “Netflix was my best friend at that time,” she says. Streaming became a form of self-education and a balm for loneliness. The first film to reel her in was Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, then Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. She fell for the work of Greta Gerwig, Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Alfonso Cuarón, directors who matched her cerebral taste for authors like Han Kang and painters like Egon Schiele and Martha Jungwirth. Lying alone in hotel rooms, in planes and trains, face lit by the glow of her computer screen, she found herself absorbed by the figures dancing across it.
“Looking back,” she says, “if not for those quiet and lonely times, I don’t know that I would have ever dreamed of acting.”
When Hoyeon exchanged her Korean modeling agency for an acting agency in January of 2020, the news registered as a blip. Her parents worried over the sudden switch, but having watched their daughter’s speedy ascent through the fashion world, trusted her call. “They thought it would happen [for me] one day if I worked hard enough,” she says.
At the same time, in an unmarked production office in Hapjeong-dong, Seoul, Hwang Dong-hyuk was on edge. The 50-year-old South Korean writer-director, best known for his work in feature films, had spent more than three months casting for Squid Game, a battle royale–style TV thriller and passion project 10 years in the making, and still had not found anyone to play the lead female role of the “hard, cold, strong, but vulnerable” Kang Sae-byeok. “I was hoping for someone fresh, with a different aura,” Hwang says. “I was searching for a kind of actor I had never seen before.”
Stella McCartney bodysuit. Alexander McQueen earrings and choker.
Then, at the last moment, a video file arrived. Cueing it up on his computer, Hwang watched Hoyeon bare-faced, in a white-walled apartment, reading three scenes as Sae-byeok. She had filmed the clip herself, after receiving the script and staying up past 2 a.m. to devour it in one sitting. “I immediately felt the shape of the Sae-byeok I had imagined,” Hwang says.
Within a week, Hoyeon had flown back to Seoul and won the part. Two months later she walked into her first official table reading, all nerves. Hwang had found an impressive cast, led by Lee Jung-jae, a Korean cinema legend; Hoyeon was the only newcomer. “At first, we couldn’t hear her at the reading,” he recalls, laughing fondly. But he knew her potential.
“It’s her warmness,” Ghesquière says, an affirmation echoed by actor Park Hae-soo, who plays Cho Sang-woo, Squid Game’s Machiavellian businessman who betrays Sae-byeok. “At first, she shared her acting-related concerns with me,” he says, “but she expressed herself so openly that, toward the end, I found myself leaning on her and confessing my own worries. In a word, we became gganbu,” he says, using the term made famous by Squid Game. “Like a real brother and sister.”
“It’s one of the biggest goals of my life,” Hoyeon begins, “having friends.” She laughs, hearing the words said aloud, but stands by them. After spending so much of her 20s isolated, floating from one country to the next, it is human connection that she craves. “I don’t think I’m a particularly strong person, but if I have good people by me, I can do what I do.”
Our main course is a heap of custardy sea urchin on a bed of steamed egg pudding. Aeri appears just in time, and Hoyeon’s face lights up. There is palpable warmth to their relationship. “Every single person I’ve run into has said to me how happy they are for Hoyeon, sincerely,” Aeri says, tucking into steamed halibut. “Everyone likes her. They always say jal sa-rat-da, she must have lived well.” (“That to me is the biggest compliment,” Hoyeon cuts in, of the common Korean phrase.)
Hoyeon’s schedule has been nonstop. “I’ve never been the resting type,” she says. Vera Wang dress. Stella McCartney bodysuit.
But she herself is far from satisfied. Once Hoyeon had wrapped her Squid Game scenes last November, before the show launched, she went to a handful of auditions and failed to land most of the roles. Yet as always, she picked herself up—went to English classes and pored over English scripts, practicing her diction. She took voice training lessons, having admired the enunciation and breath control of her costars on set. Then Squid Game came out and everything changed.
“The feeling, there’s a limit to what words can express,” Hoyeon says of becoming absurdly famous in a span of days. She says she lost eight pounds—hard as that is to believe. “I don’t know why, but I couldn’t eat. I was so confused, and it was so chaotic. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t trust it.” Her family, with whom she was “too embarrassed” to watch Squid Game, kept her feeling grounded. “My mom did joke that my acting was very realistic, like when I’m being mean to her,” she says with a laugh. “My younger sister never really took an interest in my career. She just thinks of me as her older sibling, so when she told me that my acting was ‘not that bad’ in Squid Game, I was quite surprised.”
She began thinking of the lows of her career differently. It was when she worked the hardest: learning English, training her posture and voice, broadening her worldview through art and film. “Getting farther away from other people’s gaze let me find what I wanted again and gave me time to study it,” she says. “What’s important in life is not when your career is up, but when your career is down and how you spend that time. That’s something I learned.”
Ellia returns to our table and joins us—she’s a mutual friend of Aeri’s and a fan of Hoyeon’s—and the conversation turns to the current yen for all things Korean: the Parks’ second fine-dining venture, Atomix, two blocks away, has just made the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. The best-picture Oscar for Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite comes up, as does BTS’s ongoing reign as the biggest recording act in the world. “I have always wanted to go to Hollywood and to act in America, and I still do,” Hoyeon says. “But Squid Game changed my mindset. It doesn’t have to be an American movie or a European movie, it’s the story and the message that are more important.”
“When a character like Kang Sae-byeok meets a person like Hoyeon, Squid Game director Hwang Dong-hyuk says, “it’s a synergy. Chemistry. It explodes.” Loewe body and shoes; loewe.com.
“Something Bong Joon-ho said at the Oscars that he attributed to [Martin] Scorsese was ‘the most personal is the most creative,’ and that left a deep impression on me,” she goes on. “Who am I? Who are we as human beings and a society? These are the worries I need to have to do this job. But it’s so much fun.”
It’s just past 11 p.m. when we return to the hotel and head up to the 15th floor, where Hoyeon is due for a fitting in her room. Her bags are placed neatly in a row by the bed, half-opened. The only thing out of place is a half-drunk coffee on the desk and another demitasse on the windowsill. The tailor arrives, and Aeri produces a floor-length Louis Vuitton black linen gown, slightly monastic, from Ghesquière’s spring 2022 collection. Hoyeon puts it on in the bathroom and studies herself before the glass.
“This looks good. So Dune,” she says. She tugs the cowl up and around her face, carefully considering the cut with Aeri hovering by her side. They decide to remove the hood and bring the hem up a few inches to show a sliver of skin. It looks younger, cooler, more of the moment.
Past midnight, Hoyeon is still fielding texts from friends, her family, and contacts from her many agencies. She is astonishingly self-sufficient, answering all the queries herself. Noting the open-toe sandals she will wear to the CFDAs, she has begun sussing out nail artists to confirm on short notice. “It’s from working for so long,” she says, one phone in her hand, the other on her lap. “Taking myself to castings and fittings, going to shoots. But unnie,” she says, using the Korean term of endearment, “my schedule has been really insane.”
Aeri puts on a jazz radio station that Hoyeon loved from her time in New York. She sits comfortably, cross-legged and barefoot by the bed. We sip our wine and talk about her future plans (newly signed to CAA, she’s contemplating a move to L.A.), the upcoming awards season (Squid Game will score a Golden Globe nomination in December), and the likelihood Sae-byeok will return in Squid Game season two, which is in a state of pre-preproduction. “I keep saying to do it like Penthouse,” Hoyeon jokes, referencing the popular Korean soap opera, where deceased characters routinely came back to life.
“I want to dye my hair like in Eternal Sunshine,” she declares. “But crazier. Purple? It’s my favorite color. You can write that: Please give me a character that dyes her hair purple.”
There’s a Korean word, yeol-shim, which means something like diligence. To work yeol-shim-hi is to work diligently, to work hard. But the translation, as so often occurs with Korean, is lacking. Yeol comes from the Chinese character for fire, hot, burning. Shim is from the heart, the soul, the inner self. So to work hard in Korean is more correctly said to work with a burning heart, a fiery soul. It sounds melodramatic in English, but in Korea it’s the most common of phrases. “I just want to live yeol-shim-hi,” she had told me just earlier that night.
Prada dress. Loewe shoes.
Junya Watanabe dress.
If there’s one word I would choose to describe Hoyeon, it is yeol-shim. She exemplifies the trait Koreans pride themselves most on. To work hard, to put your heart and soul into everything, until it feels as though you might explode.
The next afternoon, we are on our way to the Seagram Building, and Hoyeon, recharged from an early lunch at Locanda Verde, is practicing her presentation for the CFDA Award for American emerging designer of the year. Hunched over a piece of loose leaf, she writes down the correct pronunciation of each designer’s name in tiny immaculate script. “You know in Hollywood the media never pronounce my name right?” she says, playfully. (Too often they change the soft “yuhn” for an awkward “yoon.”)
We arrive, circling the building for the correct entrance, and Hoyeon squeezes my shoulders, singing my name, “Mon-i-ca,” in three lilting syllables, with none of the hauteur of a newly minted celebrity. “Ho-yeon-ah,” I reply. If she is nervous, she doesn’t show it. She strides into the room, ahead of her two agents, and introduces herself to the event staff. The organizer takes her through her motions for tonight. “Would you like to run through the actual thing?” she asks, expecting a polite refusal. But Hoyeon, diligent, asks to go through it once to make sure she gets it right.
“And the winner is…” she pauses for dramatic effect, then throws her hands in the air and shouts, “Hoyeon Jung!” The room erupts in laughter, staff pausing with white orchids in their hands, and she leaves the podium with a triumphant grin.
There are three paparazzi waiting outside, standing timidly by the step and repeat. A man in a red Supreme cap asks if he can take a photograph, which Hoyeon’s agent politely declines. Then he puts his camera down and takes out his phone. “Might we be able to take a selfie?” he asks in Korean.
Hoyeon walks over with a smile and flashes the V sign, for victory.
We hug one last time and make a promise to see each other soon. Hoyeon, an earnest look on her face, says that we’ll go to her favorite spot in Seoul, a hole-in-the-wall where they drizzle fresh-caught scallops with truffle oil. And unlike most people, whose words blow away with the wind, I know that she means it from the bottom of her burning heart.
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Originally posted from “VOGUE” by Monica Kim
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