When 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 Los Angeles International Airport 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 autumn, 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.
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 Los Angeles County Museum of Art 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 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 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 .” I tease her for lamenting the loss of a US$5 aluminium pot—a world-class actor being sad about an unused and she laughs. “Oh, but I’ve only been world-class for a month,” she says. “Maybe after one year, it will change.”
