The Fresh-Faced Veteran

Youn Yuh-jung’s heart-shattering performance in Minari is likely to get an Oscar nod. She’s been doing this too long to care.

- E. Alex Jung

THIS WOULDN’T HAVE happened in Korea, she thought. For one, she wouldn’t have been scheduled at 10 a.m. on the first day of a movie shoot only to be kept waiting. Imagine keeping Meryl Streep baking in the Oklahoma heat for four-to-five hours in the middle of July. But the force field of celebrity was gone. Here in the Ozarks, she wasn’t Youn Yuh-jung, the 73-year-old actress with a career that spans over half a century. On the set of Minari, she was an old Korean lady. “A Far East nobody,” she tells me, taking a long drag from a slim white e-cigarette. As in a classic American tale, she would have to start from scratch.

“I kept thinking about her as my grandma who has come to America to take care of me,” says Lee Isaac Chung, the writer and director, who drew from his childhood memories for the film. “She [left] a good life in Korea. It felt like it was happening all over again.” In Minari, the four-member Yi family—the father, Jacob (Steven Yeun); the mother, Monica (Han Yeri); and their kids, David (Alan Kim) and Anne (Noel Kate Cho)—leaves California for the hill country of Arkansas in pursuit of Jacob’s dream of building his own farm. It’s all exposition until the arrival of Monica’s mother, Soonja, played by Youn, who comes bearing gifts from the homeland: gochugaru, hwatu cards, an envelope of cash.