Hoyeon spent six months getting strong enough for Hope

Hoyeon, born Jung Ho-yeon, played Kang Sae-byeok on Squid Game. She is 32, and Hope is her first film. Na Hong-jin, who made The Wailing, cast her as Im Sung-ae, a rookie officer in the village of Hope Harbor. Hwang Jung-min, a leading Korean actor, plays the police chief she works under. The movie opened in the United States on Sept. 9. She spent the six months before the shoot adding about 4 kilograms of muscle, so she could keep a rifle of about 5 kilograms up through the long takes Na likes.

She had been a model since she was 16, talking her way into Seoul Fashion Week with no agency behind her. She was runner-up on Korea's Next Top Model in 2013 and moved to New York in 2016. Squid Game asked her to move like a different person. "It was a great challenge to relearn how to walk and move more naturally," she said then. Modeling had already taught her what a camera sees. For Sae-byeok she practiced a North Hamgyong dialect with defectors, and she kept at martial arts until the producers told her to ease off. The series premiered in September 2021. Less than a month later, Louis Vuitton named her a global ambassador. In 2022 she won the SAG Award for a female actor in a drama series. She was nominated for a supporting-actress Emmy and did not win.

Before any movie, she took a part in English. Alfonso Cuaron's Disclaimer, on Apple TV+, has her as Jisoo, assistant to Cate Blanchett's journalist. Cuaron told her to keep her Korean accent. Veteran actors had told her to pick a job where she was still learning, and Disclaimer was that job. She waited longer to choose a film. Hwang, already cast as the chief, told Na to meet her. Na has said they talked for about two hours. She arrived ready to audition. He gave her the script, and she wrote her name on the first page. She learned the reason later. Sung-ae would be firing for long stretches, and Hwang wanted someone who could do that without looking out of place. He had thought of her from Squid Game.

She passed a manual driving test on the first try. The chase car was a Hyundai Stella, an older sedan, modified so it could drift, and a racing instructor taught her. She did the road drifts herself. A double took a U-turn in a narrow alley, where the crew was afraid of hitting a real building. The opening has her fire and get back into the car. They shot it more than 20 times without a cut. The early takes still had the form she had practiced. The later ones were just fatigue, and Na wanted those. She was thinking of Jun Ji-hyun in Assassination and Kim Tae-ri in Mr. Sunshine, women who already look comfortable with a weapon. She put the muscle on so she would not be the first person on that set to run out of breath.

Na told her that Sung-ae's core is goodwill. He pictured an officer who would know how many spoons were in the village. Hoyeon read her as a young woman who stayed in a rural town, the kind of place other young people leave. Sae-byeok had been trying to get her family out. An Oct. 23 Vogue piece set Hoyeon next to Rinko Kikuchi and Jeon Do-yeon, who are playing wives this fall.

Kim Jee-woon, who directed I Saw the Devil, has shot The Hole, from a novel by the Korean writer Pyun Hye-young. Orion opens it in US theaters on June 25, 2027. Hoyeon plays the Korean wife of Theo James's professor, and the story begins after that wife is dead.