‘Bedford Park’ star Choi Moon charts his own path between Korea and Hollywood

indie drama Bedford Park The film may be Korean actress Choi Moon’s breakout hit in American cinema, but she’s nonetheless a bit worried about how it will fare with the fans who know her work best.

“When I think about the Korean audience, I’m a little nervous because I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she says. The Hollywood Reporter. After winning an award at Sundance and receiving positive reviews in Toronto, Bedford Park I finally met Korean film fans at the Busan International Film Festival this week. But her fans will see a somewhat different side of the star than they saw in Korean dramas. government (2018) or Now we are breaking up (2021).

This is a work written and directed by first-time feature film director Stephanie Ahn. Bedford Park Choi plays Audrey, a 36-year-old Brooklyn physical therapist whose mother’s car accident forces her to emotionally return to the suburban New Jersey home she has never escaped. Another driver is Ellie (Korean Wave star Son Seok-gu). arrest and DP fame), a grumpy former wrestler and Korean adoptee raised by a neglectful white mother.

When Audrey visits Eli to share her insurance information, the meeting devolves into a heated argument over who is responsible for the crash. Their second meeting turns dire when Audrey suffers a miscarriage on Ellie’s doorstep. Soon a bond begins to emerge between the two, and they glimpse the kindred spirit hidden beneath each other’s self-defense. But their intimacy is messy and hard-won. Rather than a typical encounter in a Korean romance, it is closer to the meeting of two wounded Asian American survivors and a hard worker.

Choi said he wasn’t sure how the story’s milieu of immigrant struggles would resonate with the Busan crowd and suspected “they’d be a little surprised by the R rating.” Audrey is sexually outspoken, self-destructive, and resistant to her parents’ preferred version of success, unwilling to be the dutiful daughter they want her to be even though she feels indebted to them for their sacrifices. Eli’s fractured family history left him with similar trauma.

But Choi believes the underlying sentiment must shift.

“The film is primarily a family drama and a love story between two people who see each other for the first time when they meet someone who shares some kind of struggle in their past,” she explains.

Going into the film’s Sundance premiere, she wondered whether the character’s emotional burden was felt specifically by Asians or only by their immigrant lives. But the overwhelmingly positive response from inexperienced Park City viewers was surprising and surprising.

Mr. Choi recalled, “I saw so many audience members crying at the end.”

Busan also welcomes her as part of the main competition jury led by Chinese master Zhang Yimou. For Choi, who previously judged short films, the prospect of evaluating features with such a company is both an honor and another exciting challenge (Bedford Park will be screened in the out-of-competition Flash Forward section of the festival).

Navigating an unfamiliar world has been both a lifelong challenge and opportunity for Choi. Born in Seoul, she moved to Japan at age 9 to follow her father’s banking career. She attended a Korean-Chinese school in Osaka, where classes were taught in Japanese, and later returned to Seoul and eventually moved to New Jersey, where she learned English. Each time she moved, she became a new version of an outsider.

“Even when I returned to Korea as a child, I always felt left out,” she says. “In Osaka, I tried to fit in with Japanese friends, but in Seoul, I was seen as a girl from Japan. In New Jersey, I tried to learn English and start over.”

Around age 11, she played the lead role in her school’s production of a classical Korean play. Simcheong Story And I found unexpected relief in my imagination.

“I didn’t have to be Korean, I didn’t have to be Japanese, I just had to play the character,” she recalls. “So, surprisingly, I felt very grounded and that this was something I wanted to pursue.”

She later took acting classes in New Jersey, joined a drama club on her first day of college in Seoul, and eventually appeared in a series of plays. After a failed attempt to get into drama school in London, a friend convinced the self-described theater kid to audition for her first Korean film.

She was immediately excited to land the lead role in a women’s weightlifting drama. king kong lifting (2009) — but the transition from stage to set was bruising. Accustomed to receiving only praise in theaters, Choi fought against the harsh demands of the Korean film industry at the time, and says she often went home in tears after directors scolded her for failing to deliver the performance she wanted. She also struggled with the unfamiliar aspects of filmmaking. “I didn’t know how to cry on cue, I didn’t know how to block it out, and I didn’t really know how to act on camera,” she says. But rather than retreat to the stage, she decided to explore short films and independent films to learn the mechanics of film acting.

Her breakthrough came in 2017 through a Korean biographical period drama. anarchist from the coloniesIn , she played the role of Fumiko Kaneko, a real-life Japanese anarchist. For the first time, this role allowed her to leverage her mixed identity and fluent Japanese skills as professional assets. The following year, she received the Busan Actress of the Year Award for her Korean performance in a drama directed by Han Garam. our body.

But despite her English skills, the possibility of auditioning in Hollywood never occurred to her. Perhaps that’s because so few Korean stars have successfully crossed over to the American industry, she says.

Things changed in 2019 when her agent sent her Ahn Jae-hyun’s script on a whim. audrey park. Choi usually prints out the script and reads it while sitting at her desk, but when she opened this script on her phone, she was so absorbed in Audrey’s story that she kept scrolling until the last page. She quickly shot and sent in a few self-tapes, but didn’t expect much, assuming the director would have plenty of options among Korean-American actors closer to home. But eventually she was invited to New York to audition and got the role.

“When I got the role, I thought, ‘Okay, this is it. This is my Hollywood debut. I’m going to get there,'” she recalls.

A few months later, the pandemic hit and production was halted worldwide, halting the project. After years of waiting, Ahn and Choi produced a proof-of-concept video that helped attract new funding. They filmed the two main characters’ contentious first meeting with American actor Clayne Crawford as Eli, originally written as a white man. Upon returning to Seoul, Choi showed the video to film industry officials. Among them was close friend and frequent stage collaborator Mr. Son, whose career had exploded since starring in the hit drama. my liberation note And an action blockbuster. arrest.

“It looks good. I really wanted to do it if the character was a Korean man,” she recalls. Choi could immediately imagine Son Heung-min in the role: his physicality, his rugged charisma, and the familiarity he had developed through several stage projects. He also lived in Chicago and was one of the very few major male stars of his generation to speak fluent English. She suggested to Ahn that Ellie become a Korean adoptee instead. After observing Son’s work, Ahn agreed to meet with him via Zoom.

Son Heung-min’s rising star power has since proven essential to raising funds. Hyundai Motor Company agreed to support this project. Bedford Park It marks the automaker’s first investment in an independent film (the company has previously collaborated with Son on a branded short). By 2025, cameras were finally rolling and Choi also served as executive producer.

The casting change gave the love story a different cultural dynamic. The two men connected to Korea in fundamentally different ways, recognizing something in each other that they could not easily explain. For Choi, this project became another demonstration of what her cross-border background can make possible. Sony Pictures Classics to be released Bedford Park Launch in the US is expected next year. Seoul-based distributor BY4M is planning a large-scale theatrical release in South Korea in February or March.

Meanwhile, Choi returned to the theater happily this time. In September, the New York performance of Simon Stone’s Korean adaptation of Chekhov’s play was completed. cherry orchard Pioneering Korean screen icon Jeon Do-yeon plays the mother in Park Avenue Armory. For Choi, performing in a play meant acting opposite an actress who had been her idol since childhood. Jeon became the first Korean actress to win the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 for a film directed by Lee Chang-dong. Secret SunshineAnd now she’s back in the awards conversation with her widely acclaimed performance in the director’s Netflix-backed Oscar-nominated film. possible love.

“She was my hero and role model. I grew up watching her films. I grew up watching director Lee Chang-dong’s films,” says Choi.

After three years of collaborating on the play’s international staging, Jeon offered some encouragement, saying Choi was still engaged. On her final night, the veteran held her hand and urged her to recognize and embrace her abilities and pursue the rare opportunities her unique background opens up.

“The point is that because I am multilingual, they asked me to go down a path that no one has walked before as a Korean actress. That really touched me,” says Choi. “I still get emotional when I say that.”

Choi now plans to audition in the U.S. while continuing to work on projects in Korea, with another play scheduled for the spring. The goal is not to abandon one home for the other, but to explore whether a balance between the two industrial bases is possible.

“My focus now is finding powerful stories that have a following. Bedford Park “I don’t know what to expect, whether it’s American, Korean, movies, TV series, any medium,” she says. But I am open to this new journey.”