hoyeon takes HOLLYWOOD

With her first English-speaking role with an A-list director, the model and Squid Game alum is proving she's here to stay.

- KATHLEEN HOU

It's a big bite, but it isn't more than Hoyeon can handle. In front of the South Korean actress is a butcher's feast of raw steak on a wooden cutting board. Executive chef David Shim of Cote Korean Steakhouse uses shiny silver tongs to place the squares of meat-precisely cut, towering, perfectly marbled-one by one on a fiery barbecue grill. As they begin to cook, Hoyeon inhales with the kind of relish that most people reserve for a rose garden.

"So juicy," she says, grinning ear to ear at the meat perfume, the steam bathing her rosy cheeks. She takes a strip of red leaf lettuce, elegantly dips the tip of her chopsticks into the spicy ssamjang, and adds daikon cubes and a piece of glossy beef on top. In one smooth motion, she opens her mouth wide to reveal picture-perfect teeth (befitting the face of a Lancôme ambassador), folds the whole thing in half-and it disappears. Her eyes squeeze shut. Her face tips to the sky. She wiggles and shimmies back and forth on the wooden bench, bopping for a full minute in response to the dopamine hit. "Mmm!"

Beyond the meat bliss, Hoyeon has been feeling giddy about life in general these days. She continues to be a modelling force, with her finely symmetrical face appearing in magazines, ad campaigns, and the occasional billboard. Her debut acting role in Squid Game made her a breakout star in 2021 for her magnetic performance as Kang Sae-byeok, a North Korean defector with an "I'm not here to make friends" iciness, who participates in the deadly competition to provide for her little brother. A year later, she won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Female Actor in a Drama Series. Now she has 18.8 million followers on Instagram and fans all over the world. (When a group of NYC teenage girls wearing baggy jeans spot her outside the Chinatown coffee shop that we moved to post-steak dinner, they quiver and audibly freak out.)