‘Beef’ Star Youn Yuh-jung Didn’t Expect Any of This

Reported by Vogue.

Youn Yuh-jung has spent her career saying exactly what she thinks—and getting away with it. When a reporter asked her at the 2021 Oscars what Brad Pitt smelled like, she didn't hesitate: "I didn't smell him. I'm not a dog!" At the BAFTAs, she casually called the British "very snobbish people," a line that could've landed badly if not for her perfect comic timing. The audience roared. "It came out naturally," she tells Vogue of that moment. "It was five in the morning in Korea time. I wasn't myself."

The comment wasn't pure improvisation—it was rooted in her real experience as an acting fellow at Cambridge in the early 2000s. She'd observed the institution's well-educated elite and, well, found them exactly as she described. Yet Youn's bluntness is precisely what's made her a global force. After winning the Oscar for best supporting actress in Minari (becoming the first Korean actor to win in that category), she's since appeared in Pachinko, The Wedding Banquet, and most recently season two of Netflix's Beef, where she plays a billionaire country club chairwoman named Chairwoman Park.

How She Got Here

Youn's path to this moment was anything but linear. It began with a fluke in the 1960s when, as a Seoul university student looking for part-time work, she was asked to hand out prizes on a children's game show at a TV station. "I said, 'Okay, I'll do it,'" she recalls. "And then they gave me the check. I was surprised, so I kept going." A producer eventually invited her to audition for an acting role—her major was Korean literature, not film—and her 1971 debut in Woman of Fire made her a star. But at the height of her fame, she abandoned acting to follow her singer husband to Florida, becoming a housewife and mother.

When he left her in 1987 after a series of affairs, she was a divorced single mother in a country where, as she puts it, "divorce was like a scarlet letter." No TV network would touch her. A screenwriter friend convinced her to stay in Korea instead of fleeing back to America: "You are not the sinner. Why are you trying to run away from Korea?" Youn rebuilt her career piece by piece, taking every role available. "It was a job to me," she says. "I did not consider myself a star; it was not glamorous to me. I was just a single mother trying to feed both of them."

She didn't feel truly free to choose her projects until around 65, once her sons were settled—including after her elder son came out as gay in 2000. For Beef, she negotiated the right not to speak English (a clause that hilariously backfired when her role ended up requiring more dialogue than expected). She even personally convinced legendary actor Song Kang-ho to take the role opposite her, buying him dinner and wine afterward. When asked for life advice, she laughs: "I don't give any advice. It's a waste of my time." Youn's refusal to perform wisdom—or apology—is exactly why audiences can't get enough of her.

Read the original at Vogue.