Hoyeon Is Still Chasing the Next Challenge

Outside of Equinox SoHo on a recent Tuesday morning, Hoyeon put her beautiful, blemish-free face on dirty New York construction scaffolding. Without being asked, she kept her cheek pressed to a pole streaked with God knows what so that Juergen Teller could take a photo. Around her, guys shuffled in and out of the gym, and ladies carrying backpacks and Stanley cups walked to work, a few of them looking over at her, confused. Later that morning, after heading south to Varick and Canal, Hoyeon and Teller found a knocked-over stop sign. She marched it into the street and held it up like a flamboyant crossing guard, literally stopping traffic. She seemed to enjoy it.

Before her breakout in the dystopian K-drama Squid Game, Hoyeon hustled as a model in New York. Late this summer, the 32-year-old, who lives in South Korea, was back in Manhattan promoting her debut film, the alien thriller Hope. She signed on to the project before reading the script because of the director, Na Hong-jin, a blockbuster auteur who hadn’t made a movie in a decade. “I wanted to grab it,” she explained.

Hope is set in the 1990s, in an isolated South Korean town called Hope Harbor that’s suddenly attacked by a creature that throws cars like they’re tennis balls and uses dead bodies to whack off people’s heads. The bumbling chief cop, Bum-seok (played by Hwang Jung-min, one of Korea’s biggest movie stars), can’t fight off the ­ humanoid-alien monster until Hoyeon’s character, the competent junior officer Sung-ae, arrives. Saving Hope Harbor becomes more challenging as additional aliens, played by Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, and Taylor Russell, emerge. Throughout the saga, Sung-ae stays indignant that evil dare exist. “Director Na wished for each human character to represent a specific aspect of humanity,” said Hoyeon. Sung-ae ­ personifies “goodwill.” It’s incidental that the male cop is an idiot and the female cop is capable. “This movie isn’t about a woman and a man.”

The day before her cover shoot, we had breakfast at a hotel on the Lower East Side. The bottom half of Hoyeon’s hair was bright blue for a Netflix series called Outback, a Korean drama in which she plays a live streamer. “The blue was my idea,” she said, proudly. She came to breakfast in a T-shirt and big workman pants, her hair in a low, messy ponytail. She wore neither nail polish nor makeup, and giggled often.

Hoyeon spends much of Hope shooting guns, chasing aliens in a speeding car, and shooting guns while chasing aliens in a speeding car. Before filming around Korea and in the Romanian forest, she did six months of stunt prep—lifting weights, training to load and fire a 12-pound rifle, and learning to drive stick shift. (All of the movie’s cop cars are vintage Hyundai Stellars, each one defective in its own way.) She found the cars more challenging than the guns. One afternoon, while she was practicing for her manual license test on a highway, her car abruptly stopped. Police came to help. Even so, “I got my manual license on my first try,” she said, holding up a peace sign.

Hoyeon grew up in Seoul with two sisters, one older (now a graphic designer) and one younger (now a bassoonist). Her father was a butcher who tried his hand at ­ business, which landed the family in debt. Eventually, he found some success by starting a 24-hour diner. When Hoyeon was 14, a new performing arts high school opened in Seoul, and she asked her dad for permission to enroll. He said no, worried it wasn’t academic enough. (The school, Hanlim Arts, was later dubbed an “idol academy” for churning out so many K-pop stars.) Because she is five feet nine, thin, and unquestionably beautiful, Hoyeon was often told to model. “I was working part-time on different jobs. I heard I could possibly earn more money modeling. I wanted to make money,” she said. “I’m the middle child, so I have a competitive streak.” She joined a modeling academy, then majored in modeling at Dongduk Women’s ­ University.

“There was a curriculum about how to walk in a four rhythm, an eight rhythm, and how to walk straight. It was quite mathematical. When your elbows are in front, you need a 45-degree angle. When your elbow is back, it should be at a 15-degree angle.” At 19, a honey blonde Hoyeon joined Korea’s Next Top Model, a franchise of the mega-successful Tyra Banks–hosted competition show. As in the American version, pretty, ambitious girls competed against one another in runway walk-offs and photo-shoot challenges, all while living together in a house full of drama. Contestants submitted to dramatic makeovers in the hopes of winning a modeling contract, W100 million, and a W Korea cover. “It’s kind of inconceivable that you’re with strangers for a month, and when you wake up, someone is eliminated,” said Hoyeon. She went on the show because “I wanted to succeed. I wanted success.” She didn’t win, but she got close: runner-up. She left with the mindset that “I needed to beat someone in order to advance.”

The real catalyst for her modeling career was dyeing her hair cherry red and moving to New York in 2016. That fall, at her first Paris Fashion Week, Louis Vuitton booked her exclusively. Two seasons later, she walked in 23 shows, from Marc Jacobs to Miu Miu. “New York really mellowed me out,” said Hoyeon. “I realized it’s not just about competing. You have to become super aware of what your strengths and weaknesses are. You go to maybe 10 auditions a day. Even if this was a great season, the next one you might not get any shows.” Often on long flights for shoots, then alone in hotel rooms after wrapping, she watched a lot of movies. She figured she’d try that and took acting lessons while on a break in South Korea. “Maybe it was a very naive idea, but I thought, as you age, the acting blooms.”

In February 2020, while prepping for New York Fashion Week, Hoyeon did her first-ever audition, a self-tape for a new Netflix show called Squid Game. The director, Hwang Dong-hyuk, asked to meet her in South Korea, so she canceled all her Fashion Week plans. “Seventy ­ percent of the audition wasn’t really good because I was so stiff,” said Hoyeon. “But then the last 10 minutes were great because I was sobbing while reading my lines!” She booked the role of Kang Sae-byeok, a withdrawn, intense North Korean defector and one of the cash-strapped ­ contestants trapped in an undisclosed location, forced to compete in children’s games in which losers are killed.

When Squid Game premiered, in September 2021, Covid was still keeping many people at home, bored and alone. In the show’s first 28 days, it was watched for a cumulative 1.65 billion hours and quickly became Netflix’s most-watched show ever, a title it still holds five years later. Within three weeks of Squid Game’s premiere, Hoyeon’s Instagram following had shot up from 400,000 to 15 million. (It’s now up to 16.9 million.) For her first acting job, she was nominated for a SAG Award, which she won, and an Emmy. “At the beginning, it was very ­ overwhelming,” she said. After finishing the show’s yearlong press tour, “I tried to hide from the rest of the world. It was just me in my cute little home. I was tired.”

Hoyeon rewatches Squid Game when she needs “more encouragement” while filming something new. “I felt I was losing my innocent mindset,” she said. “I wanted to go back!” And yet Hoyeon still seems dazzled by movies. Hope premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and is one of the top-grossing movies in Korea this year, outperforming hits like Project Hail Mary and Avatar: Fire and Ash. She giddily told me that Anora director Sean Baker watched Hope and said he liked it, and that DC Studios honcho “James Gunn posted on his Instagram that he enjoyed the film!”

Maybe Hope appeals to directors because it plays with thriller and sci-fi tropes—mysteriously murdered animals, an intergalactic species descending upon a rural town—but the twist, if you can call it that, is unconventional. The male and female cop do not fall in love. The clumsy police chief does not get better at his job. Instead, the movie suddenly questions the righteousness of the humans’ fight. “The film shows the tragedy that comes from a clash of­ perspectives,” Hoyeon told me toward the end of our breakfast. Director Na “wanted to showcase how destructive the results of acting out of goodwill can be.”

To say goodbye, Hoyeon gave me a double high five.

Hair by Bryce Scarlett at the Wall Group; makeup by Emi Kaneko for Victoria Beckham at R3 MGMT; manicure by Mei Kawajiri using Dior Le Baume at Red Represents.

Olha Ostapchuk; Production Assistants: Ariana Kristedja, Jackson Wakefield, Ariel Steinbach, Justin Oceguera; Tailor: Lindsay Wright. Special Thanks To The Standard, East Village.