Jung Hoyeon for i-D magazine: photoshoot, video interview, article snippets

[adenar.livejournal.com]

It’s a breakout role that a young actor gets only once in a lifetime. Still, at 27, Hoyeon is no stranger to the camera. For years, she was a successful model, beloved by Nicolas Ghesquière at Louis Vuitton and walking and working with just about everyone else in the fashion industry, easily identified on the runway for her dyed hair, which ran the gamut from oxblood red to Poison Ivy scarlet.

At five foot nine and a half, her height had always marked her out from her peers when she was growing up in Myeonmok-dong, a neighbourhood of Seoul. “Believe it or not, I was good at school,” Hoyeon says. “Then I got sick of studying. People told me, ‘Oh, you’re tall so you’ve got to be a model.’ And that was it!” Her parents thought her desire to get into fashion was “kind of a teenager thing”, but she came runner-up on Korea’s Next Top Model in 2013 and ended up modelling for almost a decade. At one point, she was tipped to be the next big thing, but then, as she charmingly puts it to me today, her career started going “a little down”.

“After fashion week, if you’re still a hot model, you could have more shoots and editorials and advertisements,” she admits with thoughtful openness. “But for me, I think that was very temporary. It wasn’t like a permanent feeling that I could get more jobs.” Her success, in other words, felt all too impermanent.

Then, when she moved to New York in 2016, it was the first time she’d ever lived apart from her parents, and once the chaos and tumult had subsided, she found herself alone in hotel rooms, a drifter indulging in what she calls “philosophical thinking”. She began feeling increasingly isolated: “I think it was because of the language barrier. While I was working around the world I couldn’t communicate with people, and that made me lonely.”

She found herself thinking: ‘Who am I? What am I doing?’ and turned to film for the answers. “Almost every time in the movies, the main characters are fucked up,” Hoyeon says. “So they taught me that’s it’s ok to fuck up, you know?” Since I was a teenager I thought that I had to be perfect, that people have to fall in love with me so that they would book me.” Every time she messed up, she says, she panicked and worried that people would think she was “the crazy one, or that I’m not mature”. She pauses. “I think I wanted to be loved.”

It sounds like you had what we call an existential crisis, I tell her. “Right! Exactly,” she affirms. She started tearing through films – everything from Marvel blockbusters to Noah Baumbach indies. She’d find actors she liked, like Frances McDormand, and work her way through their filmography. She began taking acting classes back in Korea, preparing herself for walking along that well- trodden route from model to actor, one that her Squid Game co-star Lee Jung-jae, who plays the endearing deadbeat Seong Gi hun, navigated in the 90s with enormous success.

But Hoyeon was still very much only a working model when the script for Squid Game landed in her inbox, complete with a somewhat terrifying command to film her video audition ASAP. “I barely slept, really,” she says, of how nervous she was, “and I couldn’t eat that well. I couldn’t even feel hungry.” It was only at her third table reading that she met the rest of the cast – including Korean acting legends like the aforementioned Lee and Park Hae-soo, who plays Gi- hun’s uptight and outwardly successful childhood friend.

“After that table reading, the director came and asked me: ‘Are you nervous?’” Hoyeon laughs. “He thought that I’m the kind of weirdo who’s never nervous – someone like Sae-byeok, who is not afraid of any kind of situation or people. But I told him I’m not the person that you thought I was.”

sources: i-d.vice.com, i-D

Comments

[broadcities.livejournal.com]

she is so pretty and charming and such a fun model! i'm also looking forward to see what kind of acting project she takes on next.

the props in this shoot are so random! a shell? a spine? a lighter??

[rosiemotleymind.livejournal.com]

She’s so pretty. As a person who has genetic under eye bags it’s nice seeing someone so pretty with eye bags as well. Like perpetually tired looking but make it fashion lol.