In the nearly three decades since she made her big-screen debut in 1997’s The Contact, Jeon Do-yeon has earned a richly deserved reputation in South Korea—and far beyond it—as the kind of actor who inhabits her characters so fully that it ceases to feel like acting at all. (International audiences likely know her best for 2007’s Secret Sunshine, a wrenching portrait of a grieving mother that made her the first Korean performer to win an acting prize at the Cannes Film Festival.)
Critics often reach for the word “fearless” to describe her, but when we speak via Zoom at the tail end of a marathon press day in Seoul, Jeon waves that notion away.
“I’m always scared, and I’m full of fear, especially in front of the camera,” she says, with a laugh. “I’ve been working as an actor for quite some time, but it’s an ongoing process.” In fact, it’s important to her that she never gets too comfortable. “I actually enjoy having that fear and anxiety, and trying my best to work through it, because sometimes something completely new comes out of that struggle.”
That willingness to sit in discomfort is vividly,
