Bae Suzy, the nation’s first love who keeps choosing women with something to hide

Bae Suzy

Photo: K-POPIT 케이팝잇 / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 10, 1994 Gwangju, South Korea
Occupation	Actress and singer
Known for	Ashfall, Architecture 101, Wonderland
Awards	Baeksang Award · KBS Drama Awards · 4 Seoul International Drama Awards · Blue Dragon Award · Director's Cut Awards · Asia Artist Awards

The premise of Portraits of Delusion, the Disney+ series still waiting for a premiere date, fits inside a single commission. A struggling painter is hired by a reclusive woman to make her portrait, and when she finally lets him see her, she is young. She wants to be painted old. No artist who has worked in that house has left it alive or in his right mind, and the woman, it turns out, does not age because she is a vampire. Bae Suzy plays her. It is a strange part for an actress whose country has spent most of her career asking her to stay exactly as it first saw her, and it is the latest in a run of women she has played who are not what they appear to be.

The phrase arrived early and never left. Korean media began calling her the nation’s first love, gungmin cheotsarang, after a melodrama in which she played the college-age self of a woman an architect has failed to forget for most of his adult life. She was seventeen, a member of a girl group, and a year into acting. The label has followed her into every press conference since, and into every casting choice that has tried to get out from under it.

Bae Su-ji was born on October 10, 1994, in Buk District, Gwangju, the middle of three children. Her father, Bae Wan-young, had coached Korea’s national youth taekwondo team. Before any audition she modelled clothes for online shops and danced with a street crew, partly to persuade her parents that she meant it about becoming an idol. In 2009 she got through the preliminary round of Mnet’s Superstar K and was eliminated soon after. A JYP Entertainment scout had noticed her anyway; she sang an excerpt of Younha’s “Love” and became a trainee. She later graduated from the School of Performing Arts Seoul in 2013.

In 2010 she debuted as one of the four members of Miss A. Their first single, “Bad Girl Good Girl,” topped the Gaon Digital Chart, finished as the best-performing single of that year and won Song of the Year at the Mnet Asian Music Awards. The group gave her a public; acting gave her a persona.

Her screen debut came in Dream High, the KBS school drama of 2011 about teenagers training for music careers, in which she played Ko Hye-mi and won Best New Actress and a Best Couple award, with Kim Soo-hyun, at the KBS Drama Awards. The following year Architecture 101, her first film, cast her as the younger Yang Seo-yeon, the first love an architect is forced to revisit when she reappears as a client. It drew more than 4.1 million admissions in nine weeks, then a record for a Korean melodrama, and earned her Best New Actress in film at the 48th Baeksang Arts Awards. She became the first Korean female celebrity to collect rookie prizes in music, drama, film and variety, the last for the reality show Invincible Youth 2. Advertisers followed: she earned more than ten billion won in 2013 from over fourteen endorsement deals, the trade press coined “Suzy power” for the sales bump her campaigns produced, and products from perfume to jeans and lipstick carried her name.

The parts that came next largely honoured the nickname. In Gu Family Book, a 2013 MBC fantasy period drama opposite Lee Seung-gi, she took a Top Excellence award at the MBC Drama Awards and Outstanding Korean Actress at the Seoul International Drama Awards. Uncontrollably Fond, a 2016 melodrama with Kim Woo-bin, passed four billion views on the Chinese platform Youku. While You Were Sleeping, the 2017 SBS fantasy with Lee Jong-suk, cast her as a field reporter who sees the future in her dreams, and won her the Asia Star Award for actresses at the Asia Artist Awards. Between those two series, in September 2016, her wax figure went on display at Madame Tussauds Hong Kong, the first ever made of a Korean female celebrity; a second followed in Singapore.

The exception in that stretch was the one people saw least. For The Sound of a Flower, released in 2015, she trained in pansori for a year to play Jin Chae-seon, remembered as Korea’s first female pansori singer, a woman barred from performing in public during the Joseon era because of her sex. It was the first time a role asked her to fight the room rather than charm it.

YouTube video — Hair, makeup, then work: a working day filmed for Suzy’s own YouTube channel

Music kept running in parallel. “Dream,” her 2016 duet with Exo’s Baekhyun, entered Gaon’s weekly digital chart at number one and won Best Collaboration at the Mnet Asian Music Awards. Her first solo EP, Yes? No?, arrived in January 2017, its pre-release “Pretend” topping all eight Korean online charts; Faces of Love followed a year later with “Holiday,” featuring DPR Live, and “Midnight,” built on a piano ensemble by Yiruma. In December 2017 JYP announced that Miss A had disbanded. Bae stayed with the agency until her contract expired in March 2019, then signed with the acting agency Management Soop, which still represents her.

The move changed the shape of the work. She played a secret agent in the spy series Vagabond and Ha Jung-woo‘s wife in the disaster film Ashfall, both in 2019. In 2020 she starred in Live Your Strength, a short film Kim Jee-won directed from an original story Bae wrote herself, then in Start-Up, the tvN series in which she played Seo Dal-mi, a would-be founder who wants to become Korea’s Steve Jobs, a role that brought her a second Outstanding Korean Actress prize in Seoul. In 2021 she marked ten years since her debut with an online concert, Suzy: A Tempo, and in February 2022 she returned to music after four years with the single “Satellite.”

Then came Anna. Lee Joo-young’s psychological thriller for Coupang Play, which premiered in June 2022, gave her the title role of Lee Yu-mi, a woman who tells one small lie and ends up living an entire life under someone else’s name. For the first time the warmth audiences trusted in her became the instrument of a deception, and the reviews treated her as a different performer. The series won her Best Actress at the 2nd Blue Dragon Series Awards, Best Actress in a Series at the Director’s Cut Awards and the international Best Actress prize at the Seoul International Drama Awards, all in 2023, along with a Baeksang nomination. In August 2026 MBC gave Anna its first broadcast television run, six episodes over three Sunday nights.

The breakthrough came with an asterisk. Weeks after the premiere, Lee publicly accused Coupang Play of cutting her eight-episode series down to six without her consent and asked for her name to be removed from the credits; the platform replied that her edit departed from what had been agreed and that it had acted within its contract, and an eight-episode extended version was released in August 2022. The performance that redefined Bae reached most viewers in a version its own director disowned. Her next big hit carried its own argument. Genie, Make a Wish, Kim Eun-sook’s 2025 Netflix fantasy, made the Islamic figure Iblis its romantic lead, and some Muslim viewers called it culturally insensitive; the reviews were mixed. The pattern is worth noticing. The projects that have stretched her furthest have often arrived wrapped in disputes she did not start and could not settle.

Netflix’s Doona!, in October 2023, turned her own former job into fiction: Lee Doo-na is a retired idol living in a shared house whose public sweetness hides a private collapse, adapted from Min Song-ah’s webtoon The Girl Downstairs with Yang Se-jong as the student who falls for her. In 2024 she returned to cinema in Kim Tae-yong’s Wonderland as Jeong-in, a flight attendant who pays an artificial-intelligence service to keep a simulated version of her comatose astronaut boyfriend, played by Park Bo-gum, talking to her, and then finds the real man harder to live with when he wakes up. The same year she busked across Germany for the KBS2 music show Moving Voices.

Genie, Make a Wish reunited her with Kim Woo-bin nine years after Uncontrollably Fond. Her Ki Ka-young is a woman born without ordinary feeling, raised to a strict routine by her grandmother, who meets a genie freed after almost a thousand years. Released on October 3, 2025, it was Netflix’s most-watched non-English series in its first full week, with eight million views, and reached the top ten in fifty countries. In February of that year she had released the single “Come Back”; in March she recorded the Korean version of “Waiting on a Wish” for Disney‘s Snow White.

Away from the screen, her giving has been steady and mostly unannounced. Reports in 2014 revealed that she had been donating ten million won a year to children with cancer and leukaemia; that April she gave fifty million won after the Sewol ferry sinking, and the same year, at nineteen, she registered as an organ and tissue donor. She joined the Honor Society of the Community Chest of Korea, and by 2025 her donations to the Hope Bridge disaster relief association had reached six hundred million won. She gave one hundred million won through UNICEF Korea after the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquakes and the same sum for the Yeongnam wildfires in March 2025. It reads as a different kind of discipline from the one her father taught on the mat.

Her most recent premiere offered a voice rather than a face. She narrates Long Long Night, Youm Kyu-bock’s animated adaptation of Ruri’s children’s book about a white rhinoceros and a penguin crossing a dangerous wilderness, which had its world premiere in the Centrepiece section of the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, then competed at the Busan International Film Festival in October and screened at Sitges. Seven O’Clock Breakfast Club for the Brokenhearted, Lim Sun-ae’s adaptation of Baek Young-ok’s novel, in which she plays Yoon Sa-gang, a flight attendant who cannot let go of a breakup, opposite her Doona! co-star Lee Jin-wook, premiered in competition at Busan in 2025 and is due in Korean cinemas in December.

Portraits of Delusion is the larger bet. Han Jae-rim directs the adaptation of Hongjacga’s webtoon, set in Gyeongseong in 1935, with Kim Seon-ho as Yun I-ho, the painter, and Bae as Madam Song Jeong-hwa, the ageless sitter. The production, budgeted at around forty-five billion won, came to her in 2024 after its first pairing, Ryu Jun-yeol and Han So-hee, withdrew. Disney+ announced it for 2026; in February, after reports about tax allegations against Kim, the platform said the schedule had not been finalised, and it remains listed for the second half of the year without a date. Beyond it, she has been filming Men of the Harem since May 2026, including weeks on location in Kazakhstan: a Studio Dragon production for tvN and Netflix, directed by Lee Eung-bok from Alphatart’s web novel, in which she plays Latil, an empress who, after her father’s assassination and a lover’s betrayal, secures her throne by taking five royal consorts. It is due in 2027.

A vampire who wants to be painted old, then an empress who chooses her own husbands. Korea named Bae Suzy its first love when she was seventeen. At thirty-two, she is picking roles that no longer need anyone’s permission to be loved.