With 'Project Y,' Jeon Jong-seo marks end of beginning
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"I always try to hit the opposite note," she explains. "If a character's supposed to be scary, I lean into something childish instead. That's what makes it interesting, what keeps the audience guessing — wanting more."
Her wild ride through her 20s, she says, has found its final expression in the upcoming "Project Y." "Looking back now, there were roles I kept chasing, kept building toward. 'Project Y' feels like the destination."
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Jeon Jong-seo had a dream run through her 20s — almost straight out of a movie.
At 23, with almost zero acting experience and barely a week at her new agency, she landed the lead in art house auteur Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" at her very first audition. The mysterious slow-burner premiered at Cannes in 2018 to rapturous reviews, made the Oscar shortlist and announced Jeon as a face for the world to remember.
Two years later came "Call," where she made a chilling turn as a psychopath who weaponizes a phone line connecting across decades. Then Hollywood beckoned, leading her to star as a telekinetic asylum escapee in Ana Lily Amirpour's "Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon" in 2021. It was her first English-language role.
Though the film did not exactly blow up, it caught the right eyes. She's now shooting Chad Stahelski's $100 million reboot of "Highlander" alongside Henry Cavill, Russell Crowe and Dave Bautista.
It's the sort of ascent most actors could only dream about, and Jeon knows as much.
"When I debuted with 'Burning,' I felt like I got so much love from the veterans and directors in Korean cinema," she says at a cafe in central Seoul on a Friday afternoon. "That's what kept me making films, what kept me in this world. It felt like something I had to repay."
Many roles have come and gone since. What ties them together is something intensely unfathomable, simmering just beneath the surface. In "Burning," her Hae-mi is playful and wounded in equal measure; her dance to Miles Davis is still talked about years later, though you'd be hard-pressed to say what exactly lurks behind those exquisite gestures. In "Call," she flips between wide-eyed innocence and something genuinely unhinged.
That ambivalence is the whole point, and Jeon always finds her way there.
"I always try to hit the opposite note," she explains. "If a character's supposed to be scary, I lean into something childish instead. That's what makes it interesting, what keeps the audience guessing — wanting more."
Jeon has the kind of eyes that swallow you whole: wide, almost hypnotic in their stillness. She pauses for long stretches before answering questions about her craft, which seems to suggest an instinct at work that resists easy articulation.
Her wild ride through her 20s, she says, has found its final expression in the upcoming "Project Y." "Looking back now, there were roles I kept chasing, kept building toward. 'Project Y' feels like the destination."
Much has shifted since then, she adds: her fashion, her music, even the words she reaches for in conversation.
A noir caper that premiered at Toronto last fall, "Project Y" puts Jeon opposite fellow star and close friend Han So-hee, a pairing of two of Korea's most bankable female actors at the moment. The setup is pure pulp: Two women deep in Seoul's neon-lit underworld of high-end escorts and dirty money steal a cache of black-market gold, soon to find themselves running from ruthless thugs who want it back.
The film hurtles forward without catching its breath, much like Jeon herself these past 10 years or so. She plays Do-kyung, a steely, tomboyish presence in baggy streetwear who offsets Han's softer grain. Where Han's Mi-sun wears her wounds openly, Do-kyung endures whatever loss comes her way and carries on.
The role is flatter than any of Jeon's previous work; the screenplay's plot-heavy rhythms and occasionally stilted dialogue fail to showcase her range to its fullest. Even so, the actor's knack for duality finds its moments.
Director Lee Hwan noted that Do-kyung came out different than he envisioned. As it happens, she hears that from directors often.
"Some projects let you play it straight. Others need variations, unexpected angles, and I saw this one as the latter," she says. "That freedom is what being an actor is about — that's what makes all this fun."
"Do-kyung runs through the whole film, start to finish, but she could've been one-note. So I thought, I need to stir up some trouble. She's this quiet, stubborn woman who seems to just drift along day to day, but underneath there's something fragile, something that might shatter or explode any second.
"I wanted to let that seep through from the start."
Whether viewers will notice that fragile undercurrent remains to be seen. Drenched in the brutality of Seoul's criminal underworld and the glitzy sheen of its high-concept premise, the film does not exactly invite close reading. But Jeon takes no issue with that, content to let the film be what it is.
"Yes, it's about people in the margins — but really it's a story about two women," she says. "Two immature girls making a mess of everything. Black comedy, in a sense.
"The fun part is watching them screw things up. And if people see it as a story about breaking free, I'd be happy with that."
"Project Y" opens Jan. 21.
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