Kim Hyun-joo Returns to Film After 15 Years in Yeon Sang-ho's AI Thriller

Kim Hyun-joo has not been on a movie screen in 15 years, and she says watching herself on one is still hard. "It isn't easy to see my own acting on a big screen," she said at an interview in a Seoul cafe on the 16th, adding that she could not properly watch the film at the Toronto International Film Festival and only managed it at the Busan International Film Festival.

The film is Paradise Lost, a psychological thriller from director Yeon Sang-ho that opens on the 21st. It is her fourth project with him, after the Netflix series Hellbound (2021 and 2024), the film Jung_E (2023) and the series Hellbound-era follow-up The Bequeathed (2024), and the broader context is a director who keeps returning to the same actor for roles that test her.

Kim plays Ryu So-young, who lost her son nine years ago in the disappearance of a camp school bus. She has been living with an AI-built version of him in a virtual world when the real son, Ryu Seon-woo (Bae Hyun-sung), returns alive.

Starting from loss, not technology

Kim said the AI premise was not what drew her. "I was less interested in the flow of the AI era or advanced technology than in the psychology So-young carries," she said. She imagined So-young as someone who had already been living as if dead, her life as artificial as the AI son. A stranger arriving to claim he is her child, she said, would feel eerie and strange.

She was also cautious about the material. Maternal love, she said, is something she feels she cannot imitate, and the grief of a parent who has lost a child is difficult and delicate to portray. She added that she may have been able to take the role precisely because she is not a mother herself.

So she began from a more general place. "I thought about what loss actually is: longing for the person, or for the time spent together and for who I was then," she said. She also said she is drawn to characters marked by lack.

That shaped specific choices on screen. In the scene where So-young wakes in the morning, Kim wanted an outwardly calm routine to show emptiness behind it, conveyed through hollow eyes. After the real son returns, So-young still cannot let go of the AI son, and Kim played that as something close to addiction. "I felt the character's choices would only be convincing if I showed an abnormal fixation," she said.

Working with Yeon Sang-ho

Kim credited the director's trust for pushing her toward unfamiliar work. "He gives me confidence that I can do things I didn't know I could," she said. Yeon, she noted, does not force much on his actors or give heavy direction; he builds a stage within a larger frame where she can move and play freely. She recalled him saying he wanted to see how she would interpret what he had written, which she found moving.

That approach fits how she describes her career. Actors grow, she said, by trying what they have not done and filling the gaps next time, and that is why she is still working. "To last a long time, I think I have to be an actor who stands upright, even if I'm a little lacking," she said.

Thirty years in, and a second role on air

Kim debuted in 1996 in a music video for singer Kim Hyun-chul and began full-time acting with the MBC drama The Reason I Live in 1997, making this her 30th year. Asked about the milestone, she joked that she dislikes seeing numbers these days, then laughed that she was kidding.

She is also on television at the same time: since the 10th she has played sniper Yoo So-ran in the tvN weekend drama 100 Days of Lies. Asked about her youthful look, she said she does light procedures such as lasers but believes heavier surgery makes flaws more visible. Accepting her own face, she said, matters more.