THE NEXT LEVEL

Squid Game made model-actor Hoyeon Jung an instant phenomenon. Monica Kim steps inside the whirlwind with the heart-on-her-sleeve megastar

- Monica Kim

WHEN HOYEON JUNG landed in America for the first time in nearly a year, she noticed that something in the air had changed. A kind of charge seemed to hover around the South Korean model turned actor, once known for her incandescent red hair, now famed for her role as a brooding North Korean defector in the Netflix hit Squid Game. She stepped briskly through the LAX terminal to the immigration desk where a delighted officer promptly asked for her autograph. A few days later she sat down to breakfast at the Beverly Hills Hotel, in jeans and a blue Henley, dark hair hastily pulled into a low ponytail. No one paid her any mind—this was the Polo Lounge after all—but then, the maître d’ slid a frothy latte in front of her. Peering up from the cup was Kang Sae-byeok, her Squid Game character, realistically rendered in milk foam.

“Sae-byeok-y coffee, isn’t that crazy? My entire life changed in just one month,” she tells me days later, now in New York. It’s hard to overstate the phenomenon of Squid Game—a dystopian survivalist series that overtook culture last fall, watched by some 142 million households in its first four weeks. (It became Netflix’s most-viewed series of all time.) Among a cast of established South Korean stars, the 27-year-old quickly emerged as the breakout.