The actress makes history as the first Korean performer to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and looks back on an acting career that stems from survival.
In ThreateningSoon-ja (Yuh-Jung Youn) moves in with her daughter’s family in Arkansas, where her grandson complains that she is not like other grandmothers.
‘They bake cookies! They don’t swear! They don’t wear men’s underwear! ‘ David whines about Soon-ja, who he thinks is rude rather than huggable, preferring pro wrestling and Mountain Dew chugging over softer, more stereotypical pursuits.
That same countercultural spirit could describe Youn himself, the Korean film legend who was writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s only choice for the role of Soon-ja. Exactly 50 years after her first film (Kim Ki-young’s 1971 psychosexual thriller) she made her American film debut Woman of fire), the 73-year-old’s dynamic and ultimately heartbreaking performance as a grandmother has earned her a slew of accolades on the award circuit like no other, culminating in a front-runner position for Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards.
“I might just be a really defiant person,” Youn says in English of her longstanding appeal to unconventional characters and screenplays. Adds Korean film scientist Kyung Hyun Kim – a professor of East Asian Studies and Visual Studies at UC Irvine who also co-produced one of Youn’s 2010 films The housekeeper – “She always went against the chaste woman in television and movies. While Korea came to terms with modernity [in the late 1970s], from a time of truly dark dictatorship when women had to sacrifice themselves, she was quite the opposite. She has been the most wayward actresses. “
Despite her obvious gift for the trade, Youn says she turned to acting more than once in her life from what she characterizes as necessity, or lack of options.
The first time around, she was not yet 20 and failed to raise the bar on the national university entrance exam to get into one of Korea’s elite universities. “It was very embarrassing. I was so sorry that I asked my mother for tuition fees to go to high school, so I was looking for a job,” said Youn, whose father had passed away earlier.
While she was touring a television station, she was offered a performance on a game show to stand next to the presenter and hand out prizes. A director at the station encouraged her to test for the drama division, which she reluctantly did, as she had no acting training. “That’s how I became an actress,” she says sadly. “Most of the talents, they see some film or theater work and fall in love, but not me. It’s a very embarrassing story.”
After a handful of TV dramas, Youn took charge Woman of fire, the second episode of Kim Ki-young’s Infamous Housemaid trilogy. The iconoclast director (“I didn’t know he was a genius at the time; I just thought he was really weird,” says Youn) let the then 22-year-old explore her range as an eager country girl seeking a job in the service of a bourgeois family, discovering of her sexuality, enduring two sequences of rape – and, in one experience, Youn still viscerally recalls dealing with live mice.
For her efforts, Youn was nominated for the Blue Dragon Film Awards in Korea, and as the likely recipient, she was urged to attend. She didn’t win that category. “Oh my god, they lied to me,” Youn said to himself. She was an industry nobody in the midst of a sea of strangers, she tried to sneak out of the room, but a guard stopped her. “You shouldn’t go out in the middle of the ceremony,” he chided, so she crept back to her chair. And then her name was voted the best actress.
The second time Youn “became” an actress was in his forties. More than a decade earlier, she had shot to the top of the Korean entertainment scene for her brave, unorthodox on-screen roles and her equally quirky personality. At the age of 28, she was married to playboy singer-songwriter Cho Young-nam, and as a famous power couple, their wattage increased – until it suddenly dissolved with their immigration to the US in the mid-1970s. Youn gave birth to two sons, immersed herself in her evangelical church in St. Petersburg, Florida, and in fact considered herself retired after that brief chapter in her life where she had been a movie star half a world away. “If you wanted to get a star in my day, you weren’t allowed to get married because the male audience would like to imagine you’re not,” she says. “So just because I’m married, that means no one would use me.”
But life – and perhaps fate – had other plans. After 10 years of marriage, the couple divorced, and the newly single mother of two, now back in Korea, found herself at a crossroads again after a significant personal setback. She still owned a home in Florida and was considering returning there. “Do I have to work for Publix as a cashier?” she wondered. Then I found out that the minimum wage was about $ 2.75 an hour. I thought, ‘I can’t educate my boys. I cannot pay my mortgage. I have no skills. What can I do? ‘
Her friends advised her to go back to acting, but she wasn’t sure about her bona fide. “Everyone nowadays [actors] I’m graduating from film school, but I don’t have acting training, ”she told them, but her friends assured her that what made her different was an asset, not an obligation.
Youn started her career at the bottom, taking minor supporting roles in television dramas. “Some people said, ‘Wow, Youn Yuh-jung is playing that little part, that’s awful,’” she recalls from the audience reception at the time – from those who remembered her.
‘But I’m the one who needed the money. That’s why I fulfilled all those roles, whatever came to mind, ‘she says defiantly, raising her voice. Looking back on those dark years, Youn says she became depressed, but threw herself into her work, going through her rules over and over, discovering the nuances in every inflection. She first came out with a sense of confidence on set: “That was the turning point I think I really became an actor.”
Starting with Kim, Youn has been a muse for several generations of Korean author filmmakers, fearlessly plunging herself into their creative visions whether undressed at the age of 65 for a sex scene in Im Sang-soo’s The taste of money (in which she plays a rich woman who takes revenge on her cheating husband by covering up his assistant and having his mistress killed) or nearly setting herself on fire when Chung ThreateningThe climaxic barn burning scene takes a little too long.
“I’m a very old actress. My principle is that I have to keep going until the director says ‘cut’,” she says with a laugh. So I kept trying to put out the fire [per the scene direction], and he doesn’t shout anything. It turns out that Isaac forgot to say “cut.”
Chung may have been partially mesmerized by Youn’s performance in his autobiographical drama, although it was not a mimicry of his own real grandmother in design. “When we were making the movie, I just knew internally that what she was doing was masterful,” he says. “I was hoping people would notice.”
They clearly have that, and now Youn finds herself braving the odds for the third time, a seven-year-old Korean actress who finds her prospects better and broader than ever, although she modestly doubts the only Western roles she would qualify for ” Korean immigrant lady who cannot speak fluently, ‘while also noting that ageism against actresses is a persistent and universal condition. Still, she’s already making a new Hollywood production: the Apple TV + series of Min Jin Lee’s acclaimed novel. Pachinko, a multigenerational, global epic about a Korean family in which the character of Youn as the protagonist is central to the story.
Not bad for an actor who never intended to become an actor – and remain so. ‘If I was in this business without it [hiatus] period, I would probably hesitate, ‘says Youn, speaking specifically about tackling the spicy content in Taste of money, but her words might as well apply to the whole leg of her journey. “But I’ve been through a lot of difficulties in my life, so I felt like it was nothing. I’m just playing someone else. I became a very daring woman myself.”
This story first appeared in an April standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to register.