The actress is making history as the first Korean artist to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor, looking back on an acting career born out of survival.
In Minari, Soon-ja (Yuh-Jung Youn) goes to live with her daughter’s family in Arkansas, where her grandson complains that she’s not like other grandmothers.
“They bake cookies! They do not swear! They do not wear men’s underwear!” David likes Soon-ja, who he says is rude instead of cuddly, and prefers to see pro-wrestling and sharpen Mountain Dew over softer, more stereotypical pursuits.
The same countercultural spirit can describe Youn himself, the Korean screen legend who was the only director Lee Isaac Chung for the role of Soon-ja. Her American film debuts exactly 50 years after her first film (Kim Ki-young’s 1971 from the psychosexual thriller Woman of fire), the 73-year-old’s dynamic and ultimately heartbreaking performance as a grandmother like no other, earned her a string of awards on the awards track, culminating in the top position as Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards.
“I may just be a very challenging person,” Youn says in English about her career-long attraction to unconventional characters and scenarios. Add 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 films, 2010s. The domestic worker – “She always worked against the wheat of the chaste womanhood in television and movies. While Korea was processing modernity [in the late 1970s], from a period of very dark dictatorship that required women to sacrifice themselves, she was quite the opposite. She was the most easy actress. ‘
Despite her clear gift for the trade, Youn says that more than once in her life she has actually acted out of what she characterizes as necessity or lack of options.
The first time, she was not yet twenty and could not clear the crossbar of the nationwide university entrance exam to get into one of Korea’s elite universities. “It was very shameful. I was so sorry to ask my mother for tuition to go to a secondary college, so I was looking for work,” says Youn, whose father passed away earlier.
While visiting a television station, she was offered a concert during a game show to stand next to the employee and hand out prizes. A director at the station encouraged her to test for the drama department, which she did reluctantly, and had no training in acting. “This is how I became an actress,” she says with concern. “Most talent, they see some film or theater work and fall in love, but not me. It’s a very shameful story.”
After a handful of TV dramas, Youn took the lead Woman of fire, the second installment of Kim Ki-young’s infamous Maid trilogy. The iconoclast director (“I did not know he was a genius at the time; I just thought he was very strange,” says Youn), had the then 22-year-old investigate her series as an avid country girl who a job that serves a civilian family, discovers her sexuality, endures two series of rapes – and Youn still visually remembers in one experience that he handled live mice.
For her efforts, the Korean Blue Dragon Film Awards nominated Youn as best new actress, and as the likely recipient, she is asked to attend. She did not win the category. “Oh wow, they lied to me,” Youn told herself. No one in a sea of strangers was an industry, and she tried to sneak out of the room, but a guard stopped her. “You must not go out in the middle of the ceremony,” he reprimanded, and she sank back to her seat. And then her name is called the best actress.
The second time Youn became an actress was in her 40s. Ten years ago, she shot to the top of Korea’s entertainment scene through her daring, unorthodox roles on screen and her equally quirky persona. At 28, she married playboy singer-songwriter Cho Young-nam, and as a celebrity couple, their watts grew – until it suddenly completely erupted after their immigration to the US in the mid-1970s. Youn gave birth to two sons. , immerses herself in her evangelical church in St. Petersburg, Florida, and considers herself effectively retired from that short chapter in her life in which she was a movie star half a world away. “If you wanted to get a lead role in my time, you were not supposed to get married because the male audience wants to suggest to him that you are not,” she says. “Just because I’m married means no one would use me.”
But life – and perhaps fate – had other plans. After ten years of marriage, the couple divorced, and the newly single mother of two, who was now back in Korea, finds herself once again at a crossroads after a significant personal setback. She still owns a home in Florida and is considering returning there. “Do I have to work as a cashier for Publix?” she wondered. ‘Then I found out that the minimum wage was about $ 2.75 an hour. I thought, ‘I can’t raise my boys. I can not pay my mortgage. I have no skills. What can I do? ‘”
Her friends recommended that she return to acting, but she was unsure about her bona fides. “Everyone these days [actors] studying at the film school, but I have no training in actors, ‘she told them, but her friends reassured her that what made her different was an asset, not a burden.
Youn starts her career at the bottom and takes small supporting role in television dramas. “Some people said, ‘Wow, Youn Yuh-jung plays that small role, it’s awful,'” she recalls of the public reception at the time – those who remembered her.
“But I’m the one who needed the money. That’s why I did all the roles, whatever came to my mind,” she says, postponing her voice. Reflecting on the dark years, Youn says she became depressed but threw herself into her work, running her lines over and over and discovering the nuances in each bend. She felt confident on the set for the first time: “It was the turning point, I think I really became an actor.”
From Kim, Youn was a muse to several generations of Korean author filmmakers and fearlessly threw her into their creative visions, whether disillusioned at the age of 65 for a sex scene in Im Sang-soo The taste of money (in which she plays a rich woman who takes revenge on her deceitful husband by bedding his assistant and killing his mistress) or almost getting herself on fire when Chung leaves Minari‘s climactic barn cooked on fire takes too long.
“I’m a very old actress. My principle is that I have to keep going until the director says ‘cut’,” she says laughing. ‘So I tried to put out the fire [per the scene direction], and he does not shout anything. It seems that Isaac forgot to say ‘cut’. “
Chung may have been fascinated in part by Youn’s actions in his autobiographical drama, although by design it was not an imitation of his own grandmother. “When we made the film, I just knew internally that what she was doing was masterful,” he says. “I was hoping people would take notice.”
Of course, they have, and now Youn finds that she has defied the chance a third time, a Korean actress who has gone awry and who finds her prospects brighter and broader than ever, although she modestly regrets that the only Western roles she is eligible for would come, ‘Korean immigrant is’ lady who can not speak fluently,’ while also noting that ageism against actresses is a persistent and universal condition. Still, she is recording another Hollywood production: the Apple TV + series adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s award-winning novel Pachinko, a multigenerational, global epic about a Korean family that will feature Youn’s character as the protagonist at the center of the story.
Not bad for an actor who never intended to become an actor – and stay one. ‘If I was in this business without it [hiatus] period, I would probably hesitate, ‘says Youn and talks specifically about tackling the nasty content in Taste of Money, but her words may just as well apply to the whole arc of her journey. ‘But I struggled a lot in my lifetime, and I felt like it was nothing. I’m just playing someone else. I myself have become a very daring woman. ‘
This story first appeared in a stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter in April. Click here to subscribe to receive the magazine.