

“The people I work with and the experiences are what’s most important,” she says. Though she’s eager to test her skills with a role in a fantasy story or romantic drama, Jung isn’t quitting her fashion day job just yet.
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“But my experience working as a model helped with understanding how to move in front of the camera and how the camera actually sees me.” “At first, I tried to get rid of habits that you would develop as a model, and it was a great challenge to relearn how to walk and move more naturally,” says Jung. That perfect runway strut? Not ideal in a horror context. Joe franchise) required unlearning some lessons she’d picked up in fashion. Preparing to act alongside established costars like Lee Jung-jae (a star in South Korea since the mid-’90s) and Lee Byung-hun (one of the nation’s most popular actors and a crossover success in the United States thanks to performances in Terminator Genisys and the G.I. Who was I? What does it mean to be human? The need to answer those questions was what brought me to acting.” “ I thought more and more about myself and my position in humanity at large. “When I’d travel by myself on airplanes and stay at hotels, I spent most of my days just watching movies,” she says. A fan of performers who disappear into their work like Frances McDormand, Doona Bae, Lupita Nyong’o, and Adam Driver, Jung’s interest in acting stemmed from a broader desire to understand herself and others better. “I’m not a huge fan of horror movies, but I like a few within the genre,” she says, nodding to artsier fare like Ari Aster’s 2019 hit, Midsommar, or Jim Jarmusch’s zombie satire, The Dead Don’t Die. Constantly on the road for modelling, she’d marathon movies as an off-duty escape, watching favourites like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Fargo, and Kill Bill repeatedly. Ironically Jung preferred art-house cinema to thrillers and gore. Within six years, she’d found representation on her own, placed second in the fourth season of Korea’s Next Top Model, and landed on the cover of Vogue’s Korean edition.ĭuring this time, Jung became a film buff. Originally from Myeonmok-dong, a suburb of Seoul, she worked freelance at Seoul Fashion Week as a teenager, getting cast in shows without help from an agency. Most models are discovered by someone else, but Jung made her way into the industry by sheer force of will.

Already a familiar face in the world of fashion, the 27-year-old has modelled for brands like Chanel, Bottega Veneta, and Louis Vuitton, which named her its latest global ambassador earlier today.

I didn’t have much context I had to use my imagination to fill in the blanks.”įleshing out a character as complex as Sae-byeok would be a challenge for a seasoned performer, but Squid Game was Jung’s acting debut. “They contained the scenes with Sae-byeok’s younger brother, the broker dealing with North Korea, and the conversation with Gi-Hun in the second-to-last episode. “I only received three parts of the script before the audition,” she shared via email from Seoul.

For Hoyeon Jung – who plays secretive pickpocket Kang Sae-byeok, aka Competitor 067 – the mystery began during auditions. Fast-paced and gore-filled, the nine episodes created by writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk kept everyone guessing until the very end – even the cast.
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Since its debut in September, the series has moved from hit to cultural phenomenon, quickly becoming the most streamed original programme ever to grace the platform. If the plot twists and turns of the Netflix hit Squid Game had you on the edge of your seat, you aren’t alone.
