Son Ye-jin, Korea’s ‘first love’ who keeps choosing the dangerous women

Son Ye-jin

Photo: 티비텐 TV10 / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 11, 1982 Daegu, South Korea
Occupation	Actress
Known for	No Other Choice, A Moment to Remember, Be With You
Awards	2 Blue Dragon Award · 3 Baeksang Award · Grand Bell Award

In The Scandal, Netflix‘s Joseon-era retelling of Les Liaisons dangereuses, Son Ye-jin plays Lady Cho, a noblewoman who wagers on another woman’s ruin and keeps the score with a courteous smile. Lee Mi-sook played the same schemer in E J-yong’s Untold Scandal, released the same year Son was being turned into Korea’s idea of innocence. The country still calls her its first love. The more interesting story is how much of her career has been spent arguing with that title.

Son was born Son Eon-jin in Daegu, the southeastern city she would later help with a large donation when it became the centre of South Korea’s first coronavirus outbreak. She started in television, in supporting parts in series such as Delicious Proposal, before cinema noticed her. Im Kwon-taek gave her a small role in Painted Fire, and Lovers’ Concerto earned her the Korean Association of Film Critics’ prize for best new actress.

Her first television parts dated from 2000. The image arrived all at once three years later. Kwak Jae-yong’s The Classic cast her as both a college student and the mother whose old love letters she finds, and the film travelled through Hong Kong and mainland China. That same year, the KBS drama Summer Scent put her in living rooms across the region. A year later came A Moment to Remember, a melodrama about a young wife losing her memory to early-onset Alzheimer’s, which sold more than two million tickets in Korea. Between them, those roles fixed the nickname: a face so guileless that audiences treated it as a promise.

She began breaking that promise quickly. In Hur Jin-ho’s April Snow, opposite Bae Yong-joon, she played a wife who falls for the husband of the woman her own husband was cheating with. The 2006 series Alone in Love, about a divorced couple who cannot quite stop living together, made her the best-paid actress on Korean television, at a reported 50 million won per episode, and won her a Baeksang Arts Award. Then My Wife Got Married handed her the role that took the first-love image apart: a woman who calmly insists on taking a second husband without leaving the first. It won her the Blue Dragon Film Award for best actress in 2008 and the Baeksang the following spring.

Commercial cinema kept making room for her. Personal Taste, the 2010 MBC romantic comedy with Lee Min-ho, showed she could carry a light series. The 2014 adventure film The Pirates, in which she captained a ship of outlaws, drew 8.6 million admissions and the Grand Bell Award for best actress. The Last Princess, Hur Jin-ho’s portrait of Princess Deokhye, a royal displaced by Japanese colonial rule, became one of the biggest hits of 2016. When its budget climbed, Son put one billion won of her own money into the production.

That film is also where the rewards and the risks of her career are easiest to see. Critics, including the Korea JoongAng Daily’s review of its history, argued that The Last Princess turned a lonely, largely powerless woman into a resistance heroine the record does not support, and the debate followed it into commemorations of the independence movement. Son won her second Baeksang for film anyway. Weeks earlier she had released a far stranger and better movie, Lee Kyoung-mi’s The Truth Beneath, playing a politician’s wife who turns on her husband’s election campaign while hunting for her missing daughter. Critics’ groups and the Buil Film Awards gave her their best actress prizes; audiences mostly stayed home, and the film earned under two million dollars. The pattern is hard to miss. Korea pays to see Son Ye-jin lovable and respects her when she is not.

Television then made her lovable on a global scale. Something in the Rain, the 2018 JTBC drama with Jung Hae-in, was a quiet study of an office worker dating a younger man against her family’s wishes. Crash Landing on You, written by Park Ji-eun, sent her as a South Korean heiress paragliding into North Korea and into the arms of a soldier played by Hyun Bin. Its finale reached a 21.7 percent nationwide rating, the highest in tvN’s history at the time, and Netflix carried it around the world. The pair had first worked together as negotiator and hostage-taker in the 2018 thriller The Negotiation. They confirmed their relationship in 2021, married in Seoul on March 31, 2022, the same year she led the JTBC series Thirty-Nine, and their son was born that November.

The return, when it came, was built against type. In Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, adapted from Donald Westlake’s novel The Ax, she plays Mi-ri, the wife of Lee Byung-hun‘s laid-off paper-industry veteran, a woman whose household arithmetic becomes a quiet engine of the film’s black comedy. It premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2025, became South Korea’s submission for the Oscar for best international feature and reached the December shortlist without a nomination. Son won her second Blue Dragon for best actress, seventeen years after the first, and was nominated again at the 2026 Baeksang Arts Awards.

The Scandal, eight episodes directed by Jung Ji-woo with Ji Chang-wook as the playboy Cho Won and Nana completing the triangle, premiered on Netflix on September 18, 2026. Reviews have praised the control of her performance more than the case for remaking a film Korea already knows well. Next is Variety, a Netflix series from Kim Yong-hoon, the writer-director of Mask Girl, in which she plays Se-eun, the head of the country’s leading talent agency fighting to re-sign the idol group she built, opposite Jo Yu-ri as an obsessive fan. Filming was scheduled to finish in early 2026, and no release date has been announced. Se-eun is one more woman who runs the game herself, and one more chance to make the first-love title look like what it has become: a description of where she started.