For many global viewers, Jung Ho-yeon will always be Kang Sae-byeok, the flinty North Korean defector who stole hearts in Netflix hit Squid Game. But the model-turned-actor, known internationally as Hoyeon, is now stepping into her biggest test yet: a full-scale big-screen debut in Na Hong-jin’s monster thriller Hope.
At the same time, she is a Louis Vuitton muse and the first Korean star to land a solo American Vogue cover, making her one of the most visible Korean faces in global fashion. Behind that glossy image is someone who walked away from burnout, found comfort in movies, and trained for months to lead the Jung Ho-yeon Hope movie that could define her next era as a serious actor.
From Seoul Runways to Global Fashion Muse
Born in Seoul in 1994, Jung Ho-yeon started taking modeling classes at 15 and was freelancing by 16, talking her way into Seoul Fashion Week shows without even having an agency. The wider public first met her in 2013 on Korea’s Next Top Model, where she finished as runner-up and turned that momentum into steady work at home.
By 2016, she felt stuck. She has described feeling like she had been “running nonstop” until she turned into “a machine that just worked,” and the question “Who am I?” pushed her to pack her bags for New York. Before leaving, she dyed her hair a fiery red on a whim, and that red hair quickly became her calling card on Western runways.
The start was shaky, including a lost Alexander Wang exclusive, but the rebound was fast. Louis Vuitton signed her as a Paris exclusive for its spring 2017 show, and soon Chanel, Miu Miu, and other luxury houses followed. By 2018 she had broken into Models.com’s Top 50 ranking.
Her fashion climb kept accelerating. She became a global ambassador for Louis Vuitton and fronted brand films like Destiny is a Journey for the Monogram’s anniversary. In 2022 she became the first Korean to appear solo on the cover of American Vogue. Yet she later admitted, “People liked the shiny version of me, but I knew I was mostly made of other things.”
When Movies Turned From Comfort to Career
Those doubts grew while she was working overseas, often flying alone and eating alone between shows. She has said that by around 2018 she was anxious and unsure who the person in the photos actually was. What filled the empty hotel-room nights were films, which she binge-watched obsessively.
She tore through the work of Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan and watched Frances McDormand performances on repeat, cycling comfort rewatches of Fargo and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. “Movies were what consoled me back then,” she explained, and at some point she thought, “I want to try expressing something that way myself.”
Quietly, she started preparing. She took English classes so she could follow movies without subtitles, and whenever fashion jobs brought her back to Korea, she slipped in private acting lessons, eventually stacking up around three months of training. In January 2020 she signed with a Korean acting agency, assuming there would be a long training period before real auditions.
Instead, an audition for Squid Game landed almost immediately. While in New York for fashion week, she was told to send a self-tape “as soon as possible.” She barely slept for three days, filming three scenes with almost no context. Director Hwang Dong-hyuk liked what he saw, called her to Korea, and offered her the role not long after meeting her in person.
The ‘Squid Game’ Breakthrough and Global Spotlight
On set, surrounded by veterans like Lee Jung-jae and Park Hae-soo, the newcomer panicked. She has recalled asking Hwang directly if she was doing all right, and hearing, “You are already enough. Sae-byeok is you.” That reassurance grounded her performance.
As Sae-byeok, a North Korean defector gambling her life for her little brother, Jung became the most talked-about face of the most-watched series in Netflix history. The performance earned her a Screen Actors Guild Award, the first for a Korean actress, and an Emmy nomination, all on her very first acting job.
The series also amplified her fashion power. She continued appearing in major campaigns as Louis Vuitton’s global ambassador and strengthened her image as a cross-cultural icon by landing that history-making American Vogue cover. Suddenly she was not just a runway favorite or K-drama star, but a global muse connecting Korean storytelling and high fashion.
In late 2021 she signed with talent agency CAA and soon filmed a supporting turn in Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple TV Plus miniseries Disclaimer, which premiered in 2024 with Cate Blanchett in the lead. On that set, Cuarón sometimes pushed her first scene beyond 30 takes over two days, a grueling process she later said prepared her for another famously exacting director: Na Hong-jin.
Inside Jung Ho-yeon’s Big-Screen Debut in ‘Hope’
Hope, Na’s first film since his acclaimed 2016 thriller The Wailing, drops a mysterious beast onto Hopo, a quiet harbor town near the Demilitarized Zone, and watches chaos unfold. Veteran actor Hwang Jung-min, who plays the town’s overwhelmed police chief, recommended Jung Ho-yeon for the cast. When they met, Na bought her jjajangmyeon and by the end of lunch put the script in her hands.
“I so badly wanted ‘Hope’ to be mine,” she told reporters, calling Na a director she had been dying to work with. In the film she plays Sung-ae, a rookie cop who screeches into town with heavy weaponry and repeatedly throws herself between the creature and the people it is trying to destroy. She is the only woman in the main ensemble, patching up the wounded between firefights and acting as the story’s moral center.
To inhabit Sung-ae, Jung spent around six months in intensive preparation. She has described gaining about four kilograms of muscle to handle a five kilogram rifle and drilling everything from firearms to stunt driving so she could perform most of the action herself.
- Building muscle to manage heavy weapons on set
- Regular firearms and tactical training
- Learning stick shift and practicing drift driving with a racing professional
- Training stamina for long, repeated action takes
Her time with Cuarón turned out to be a rehearsal for Na’s style. “Director Na does not compromise, and for a rookie like me, that was nothing short of a blessing,” she said. She felt each take made her acting sharper, and that because he refused to settle, “what made the cut is that raw, worn-down version of me,” a far cry from the pristine images that defined her modeling years.
Na has said he saw in her the goodwill at Sung-ae’s core. Jung has joked that if someone called her that kind of person, she would probably answer, “Who, me?” but she agrees that the character’s perseverance and refusal to quit match her own. With two more films, including the thriller The Hole, already in post-production and a long-term dream of trying theater someday, she is taking her time shaping a career beyond the “shiny version.” Sixteen years after walking runways for free, she says seeing her face on a movie screen still does not feel real, like that old thought: “Wouldn’t it be great to see myself on TV?”