Kim Hyun-joo, the weekend-drama heroine Yeon Sang-ho sends to hell

Kim Hyun-joo

Photo: 于平林 / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 24, 1977 Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea
Occupation	Actress
Known for	JUNG_E
Awards	2 SBS Drama Awards · 2 KBS Drama Awards · MBC Drama Awards · APAN Star Awards

Early in Paradise Lost, Yeon Sang-ho’s new film, a mother puts on a pair of glasses and goes to see her son. The boy disappeared with his classmates on a school camping bus, and the child she visits is a copy, sold to grieving parents by an AI company. Kim Hyun-joo plays her, and the casting measures how far she has come. For most of her career Korean television gave her women who were switched at birth, jilted at the altar or wronged by a husband, and asked her to make their patience bearable. The director of Train to Busan gives her a grief that technology has made worse.

Goyang, just north-west of Seoul, is where she was born, and she came to acting through teen magazines, which hired her as a model in her third year of high school. After a music video for the singer Kim Hyun-chul, she was acting on television within a year. She was cast as a film lead before she had much experience, opposite Park Yong-ha in If It Snows on Christmas and Song Seung-heon in Calla, then learned the job in supporting parts until Into the Sunlight drew an audience and Virtue gave her a first television lead.

The role that made her was a Cinderella. Glass Slippers, an SBS drama about two sisters separated as children who meet as adults without knowing it, went past 30 per cent in the ratings in 2002, the year she turned 25, and then travelled to China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Vietnam. It took her to Hong Kong cinema too, opposite the Taiwanese singer Vanness Wu in Star Runner. Then she sharpened her comic timing with Ji Jin-hee in Ms. Kim’s Million Dollar Quest, and took the heaviest assignment of those years: Choi Seo-hee, the heroine of Toji, the Land, the television adaptation of Park Kyung-ni’s novel about a family carried through Japanese colonial rule.

What came next is a story she tells against herself. After Marrying a Millionaire in 2005 she stopped working for two years, because she hated being typecast in sweet, wholesome parts; she later said she regretted it and should have worked harder to grow instead. She came back in In-soon Is Pretty as a woman rebuilding her life after prison, convicted of a killing she committed by accident as a schoolgirl. The ratings were poor. KBS gave her its Top Excellence Award anyway.

Then, within eight days in the summer of 2010, she lost her friend and first film partner Park Yong-ha, the producer who had cast her in Toji, the Land, and her father. She left for Bangladesh and the Philippines as a goodwill ambassador for the aid group Good Neighbors and gave the condolence money from her father’s funeral to build libraries in orphanages in Dhaka. “I literally fled to Bangladesh after a series of personal tragedies,” she said, “but I was consoled by the smiles of children.”

The next decade made her a fixture of the weekend drama, the long family serial Korean channels build their Saturdays and Sundays around. In Twinkle Twinkle she was a publisher’s daughter who discovers she was swapped at birth, which won her MBC’s Top Excellence Award; What Happens to My Family? passed 40 per cent and brought another from KBS; I Have a Lover handed her a double role and the top acting prizes of both the APAN Star Awards and SBS. The one sharp swerve was Blooded Palace: The War of Flowers, where she played Lady Jo, the concubine who schemes her way through King Injo’s court. It would be “more interesting for an actress with an innocent image like myself to take up this wicked role,” she said.

Cable television opened the second door. In OCN’s Watcher she was Han Tae-joo, a criminal lawyer who had once been a prosecutor with a bright future, and critics praised a character unlike any she had played. Then Yeon cast her in Hellbound as Min Hye-jin, a lawyer who stands up to the zealots feeding on a wave of supernatural condemnations. The series became the first Korean drama to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival and, the day after its Netflix release in November 2021, the most-watched series on the platform worldwide.

Yeon kept her. In JUNG_E she played the title role, a mercenary whose brain is copied for a combat-robot programme, opposite Kang Soo-yeon, who died before the film’s release in January 2023; it was Kang’s final film. In The Bequeathed, which Yeon created and co-wrote and Min Hong-nam directed, she was Yoon Seo-ha, a lecturer who inherits a family burial ground and the murders that come with it. In the second season of Hellbound, in 2024, Hye-jin returned at the head of the resistance group Sodo. Paradise Lost is their fourth work together.

The record has a gap in it. Kim has been nominated five times for Best Actress in television at the Baeksang Arts Awards, which judge Korean film and television side by side, from Her House to I Have a Lover, and has never won. Most of her trophies came from the year-end ceremonies the networks hold for their own shows. The Yeon years have not settled the matter either. The South China Morning Post gave The Bequeathed three stars out of five, and Screen Daily, reviewing Paradise Lost from Toronto, called it “an awkward, frustratingly inert blend of underdeveloped ideas about AI”. What the genre work has given her is a different job description: the adult in the room, the person whose composure lets the horror around her register.

On 10 October tvN began 100 Days of Deception, its 20th-anniversary drama, which streams on Netflix outside Korea. She plays Yoo So-ran, a sniper for the anti-Japanese group Gugukdan in 1932 Gyeongseong, who has nursed a plan for revenge against the colonial government’s second-in-command, played by Jin Seon-kyu, for 13 years. So-ran recruits Kim You-jung’s pickpocket as a spy inside the Government-General and gives her a cover name, Geum Seo-hee, taken from her own dead daughter. Two decades after playing Choi Seo-hee in occupied Korea, Kim is the one sending a young woman called Seo-hee into it.

Paradise Lost follows on 21 October in Korean cinemas, after a world premiere in Toronto and a gala screening at the Busan International Film Festival, with Bae Hyun-sung, in his first leading film role, as the son who walks back into his mother’s life nine years late. Yeon has called it the darkest story he had. Whether Korean audiences answer the cool reviews from Toronto will depend on a close-up she has been rehearsing since Glass Slippers: a woman deciding which version of her child to believe.

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The Bequeathed — Hellbound — as Min Hye-jin

Tags: actors, actresses, Yeon Sang-ho, Kim Hyun-joo, 100 Days of Deception, Kim You-jung, Hellbound

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